Siege Mentality
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Harry is the MInistry's expert on Dark magic. But now he has to figure out whether Draco is victim or perpetrator of a dangerous curse- and he stands to lose more than his life if he doesn't. COMPLETE
1. Hunters

**Title: **Siege Mentality

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Rating: **R

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Profanity, sex, some violence, themes of madness, OC character deaths, DH Spoilers but ignores epilogue.

**Summary: **Harry Potter is the Ministry's resident expert on Dark magic, and after ten years of cases, he's confident he's seen anything the Dark wizard's mind (and wand) can produce. But there's an unidentified curse on Draco Malfoy, and in the struggle to figure out whether Draco is victim or perpetrator, Harry may well lose more than his life.

**Author's Notes: **This was written for suonguyen, who won an auction over at livelongnmarry and gave me the following prompt: _Here's my three main things - Protective Harry, Bottom Draco, Cursed Draco (not really sexual in nature, maybe something affecting his health or magic or something), and a little bit of angst! oh and Post-War and ignores the Epi._ She also asked that they be friends. I think I hit all of these except, perhaps, for the "little bit" of angst. This story will be a chaptered novella, probably ten or eleven parts long, with those parts varying considerably in length. Enjoy!

**Siege Mentality**

**Part I. Hunters.**

"It's about Malfoy."

Harry raised an eyebrow and leaned his hip on the desk. Kingsley looked annoyed, but not annoyed enough to stop him from doing it, which said something interesting right there about how important this case was to him. "What about _Draco_?" Harry asked, emphasizing the name. "He and I drifted apart when he went to France a few years back, but I assumed that he hasn't done anything so terrible since then. I would have heard about it if he had."

"Well, no," Kingsley said in a tight voice that Harry had become accustomed to hearing in the last few years. Kingsley had lost his first official election for Minister and ended up leading the Aurors again. "That's because three Aurors have died already on this case, and we're trying to keep it quiet to prevent panic."

Harry stepped back from the desk and dropped neatly into the chair in front of it. Kingsley inclined his head, accepting the silent apology. Then he pushed something across the desk towards Harry. "What does that remind you of?" he asked.

Harry picked up the paper—no, the photograph, as it turned out. The colors in it were blurred and shifting, and he had the impression that something had pressed against the camera to deliberately obscure it, perhaps a cloak or a leaf. Then suddenly the dimness cleared, and he could make out a picture of stone pillars and flat rocks, familiar even before he went to Hogwarts.

"Stonehenge," he said in puzzlement, and pushed the picture back towards Kingsley. "Draco's at Stonehenge?" Though the Muggle public liked to think otherwise, there was really nothing more magical about Stonehenge than any other place in Britain.

"No," Kingsley said. He gripped the edge of the picture and glared at it as if it had killed his people. "The last Auror who died, Roger Brinsley, was carrying a special camera with him. It was linked to his eyes and set to transfer the last image he saw back to film at headquarters in case he was knocked unconscious. As it turned out, it also works in the last moments before death." He cleared his throat, and Harry looked off to the side as Kingsley bowed his head and struggled for a moment. His voice was rough when he went on. "But Brinsley's body was discovered on the coast of Wales, miles from Stonehenge."

Harry frowned and glanced back at his superior. "I don't understand why that makes a difference. Whoever killed him—" he didn't say Draco, because he wouldn't believe it was Draco until he held the undeniable evidence in his hand "—could have carried his body there from Stonehenge later."

"We traced every Apparition he had taken," Kingsley said quietly.

Harry blinked. "I didn't know you could do—"

"Experimental Department of Mysteries artifact, _not _yet released for general use." Despite the solemnity of the moment, Kingsley eyed Harry until he nodded, reluctantly. Harry had caused quite a scandal in the Ministry by getting into the Department of Mysteries and "borrowing" some of their more interesting devices on an early case. Ever since then, Kingsley had deliberately cut him out of the chain of knowledge about new procedures until there was a good chance Harry couldn't cause any damage with them. "It would have revealed if his body had been moved. Or, for that matter, if he had been near Stonehenge." Kingsley exhaled. "He hadn't."

Harry found his eyes narrowing. "And the other Aurors who died?"

"Prunella Henslow and Adam McCormick. Henslow was found drifting in the middle of the sea, but with leaves and branches all tangled through her hair and her hands covered with scratches, as if she'd been last thrashing around in a forest. McCormick apparently died in the cellar of the Ambroses—who were _very _embarrassed to find him there…"

Harry smirked. The Ambroses had been minor Death Eaters, and twice since the fall of Voldemort they'd tried to establish their credibility by supporting any rumor of a Dark Lord they heard. So far as Harry was concerned, they deserved a bit of embarrassment.

"But his body was filled with the venom of a snake found only in India."

"That still doesn't prove anything," Harry said, determined to be stubborn. He and Draco had made up their differences not long after the Battle of Hogwarts, and then Ron had done something incredibly stupid, and Draco had found out about it, but had warned Harry so he could cover it up in time, rather than trying to blackmail Ron. Ever since then, Harry had been determined to give Draco every fair chance. "Someone could have kept the snake as a pet or a guardian, and poisoned him that way."

"All the evidence points to Malfoy," Kingsley said quietly. "He was the only common thread between the areas that Henslow and McCormick went to. Very far from the forest, the sea, _or_ India, by the way."

"What about the Ambroses' cellar?"

"He was sighted closer to that house than to other places, but there's still apparently no connection. But wherever he's been sighted, a day later, there have been people going mad, having hallucinations, walking off cliffs, permanently blinded—" Kingsley turned his hand palm up on the desk. "I don't want to accuse him without proof. Maybe this isn't his fault. Maybe he's been cursed, a powerful curse that affects other people but leaves him alive. There have been reports of that in other centuries. Curse-Bearers, they were called. Meant to spread havoc. But the problem, Harry, is that we don't _know_. And now that three Aurors are dead and the press is starting to connect the incidents together, we can't simply leave the situation unmonitored. We'll have to kill him soon."

"You don't recognize the curse at all?" Harry demanded.

"We've been through every book," Kingsley said. "I've had researchers working on this for six months. Including the ones in the Department of Mysteries," he added, when Harry opened his mouth. "I have no idea what's causing it, but it's Dark magic. That's why I'm sending you. I hope that, since you're friends with Malfoy, there's a chance of your getting through to him, maybe ending the curse without having to kill him."

Harry stood. He controlled the vibrating tension within himself to say, "I'll need Brinsley's photograph, and the reports and records of the incidents that Draco was apparently involved in, and the information Henslow and McCormick were working with."

"Of course." Kingsley nodded.

"_And_ that device that tracks Apparitions," Harry went on.

Kingsley started to open his mouth, but Harry raised an eyebrow. He wasn't about to leave that behind. If he could track Draco's Apparitions, then he might be able to prove that Draco hadn't actually gone near the places he was accused of going. Why didn't Kingsley consider it was probably someone glamoured as Draco and trying to cause trouble for him, rather than Draco himself?

With a grumble and a sigh, Kingsley capitulated. "All right. But you'll have to attend an extensive training session before you're granted permission to use it."

Harry accepted that. For a friend, he would do worse.

*

Forest. He was in the forest again, and running as hard as he could, past roots and clinging branches and scraping twigs, did nothing to cure it. He pulled up, panting, and scrabbled with mad fingers at the wood in front of him.

He could hear the rush of his enemies behind him, the arms decorated with enormous claws reaching out to rend him, the teeth clashing open and shut in the gaping mouth—

He sobbed and dug at the wood, commanding it uselessly in his head to open.

And then it was gone, and the forest was gone, and the beasts chasing him were gone, and Draco turned around within the familiar confines of Malfoy Manor. He stared up the main staircase to the first floor, not quite daring to believe, in case it vanished again the way his good dreams had a habit of doing. Not until he saw the sheen of the candlelight on the stone and wood did he burst into tears of hysterical relief.

Then he turned and followed his nose to the kitchens, which overflowed with the smells of fish and roasted duck and candied fruit. He'd been running through the forest, and before that the desert, and before that the hills, for hours. He needed food.

_And then a shower, _he thought, laughing a little as the smell of his own sweat-soaked body came to him.

He was home again. He could laugh about that, now.


	2. Tipping Point

Thank you for all the reviews!

**Part II. Tipping Point.**

Harry paused in his packing and admired the device that the Department of Mysteries had invented to track Apparitions. It was worth the boring course he'd had to sit through to learn how to use it. Such an _elegant _thing, and so useful. Harry had never been able to resist useful magical artifacts, and thought people who believed they could were secretly lying to themselves.

It resembled a small cone of silvery metal, but from the top rose a delicate stalk like a strand of seaweed, and on the top of _that _was a blue ball of something soft and yielding that might be either cloth or rubber. Harry couldn't tell simply from touching it. If he touched any one of the three parts, the others would bob and sway as if they were all connected by some sort of living tissue. Just _looking _at it made visions swirl up into Harry's head. He didn't know exactly how or why it worked, but he didn't need to. Reasons had always been Hermione's province.

_At least, reasons outside Dark magic. _For some reason, Harry had become extremely proficient at getting inside the heads of Dark wizards and understanding the twisted motivations they had for casting their spells.

Not smiling anymore, Harry carefully packed the Apparition-tracking device inside the crystal case they had given him for it and then leaned one elbow on his desk, staring unseeing at the photographs of his friends and the numerous Orders of Merlin covering the walls. He didn't reckon that he deserved those Orders of Merlin, anyway. Most of the Dark wizards he tracked had a sort of mania for confronting Harry, as if they thought that finishing the work Voldemort had failed to bring off would cover them with eternal honor and glory. Sure, Harry had saved the world eleven times at the last count, but the world would have been destroyed ten times over if those wizards he'd captured didn't insist on targeting him like idiots.

Those people, he could understand. There was always a moment in a case when the world _twisted_, just so, and he could jump inside the head of someone else and ride the twisted and throbbing structures of their minds.

But Draco…

Harry smiled a little, memory returning to him so powerfully that it almost knocked him from his feet.

But Draco.

*

Harry frowned and knocked on Ron's door again. It wasn't like Ron to be missing from home on a Saturday morning. Besides, Harry and Ron had started a tradition soon after they began Auror training of going to the Leaky Cauldron at ten every Saturday and spending two hours getting drunk, complaining about their instructors, and criticizing all the Minister's pets who put their effort into pleasing the instructors instead of studying actual techniques. Ron hadn't broken that tradition yet in the two years they'd been in training.

_And anyway, _Harry thought, as he listened to his knocks resound through what certainly sounded like an empty house, _Hermione should be home even if he isn't._

"He's not there, Potter."

Harry whirled around and pressed his back to Ron's door, his instinctive reaction now when he was startled. _Auror training is good for something, after all, _he thought, as he found his wand in his hand considerably faster than it could appear in Malfoy's.

In fact, Malfoy, who stood behind him on the path that wound through this section of Hogsmeade, looked a strange mixture of bored, amused, and impatient when he saw Harry's wand pointed at him. Harry hissed under his breath and kept it aimed anyway. Maybe Malfoy wouldn't have accosted him in the middle of the street in broad daylight, and so near Ron's wards, if he meant any harm.

Then again, this was the boy—man—Malfoy who had spat at Harry when Harry offered him the hawthorn wand back and almost refused to take it. He did strange things because of his pride.

"Where is he, then?" Harry asked, when some moments had passed and Malfoy just kept on looking at him like a sphinx and preserved his silence.

"That will take some telling," said Malfoy. "He knows I know, you see, and I thought that, better than trying to convince him I don't intend to do anything with the knowledge, I'd tell you. You've always been a touch more reasonable than the Weasel."

"Keep speaking in convoluted sentences like that, and you'll see how reasonable I am," Harry said, sneering in a way that made Auror Dogsbody look fierce and which Harry hoped would do the same for him.

Malfoy tapped the heels of his hands together. "Congratulations, Potter, you've learned a new word! I'm sure it only took a month or two to stuff that one into your head." He turned around with a flourish of his cloak that Harry thought, spitefully, he'd imitated from Snape, and then glanced back over his shoulder and cocked an eyebrow. "Well? Are you coming? I'm hungry."

Speechless and angry and worried, Harry nevertheless followed him. He was sure he was a better fighter than Malfoy, now.

And he _was _curious about where Ron and Hermione might be.

*

Malfoy led him to the Leaky Cauldron. Tom, still standing behind the bar, gawked at them when Harry came in with Malfoy instead of Ron.

Harry turned away, uncomfortable. Of course the prat would have led him here. He probably intended specifically to mock Harry's Saturday ritual with Ron.

But insulting Malfoy at the moment was unlikely to make him more honest, so Harry restrained himself, nodded to Tom, and said, "A mug of Firewhisky, please."

Malfoy turned around neatly on his heel, as if he had been waiting for the moment Harry would say those words, and gawked at him like Tom had. "At _ten-thirty_ in the _morning_, Potter?" he said. "Do you _want_ to die an early death?"

"When you drink alcohol has no effect on your health," Harry said, irritated into answering an objection he knew was stupid.

"You're not going to die because of liver complications," Malfoy said. "You're going to be beaten to death by devotees of good taste." He nodded briskly to Tom, who by this point was leaning forwards, elbows on the bar, and watching them as if he thought them bloody good live entertainment. "Cancel that. Instead, we'll take two plates of eggs, ham, toast, fresh fruit—apples and those small delicate oranges they've been importing from Spain lately—and two cups of tea."

What annoyed Harry the most was that Tom turned away to get the plates just as if Harry wasn't standing there, and hadn't ordered something quite different.

Harry opened his mouth, and then shut it. On the one hand, Malfoy had no right to order for him, or treat him as if Harry had suddenly vanished, when _he _had been the one who sought Harry out and promised to explain.

On the other, there was really no point in causing a scene when Malfoy was the only one who seemed to have information about Ron and Hermione. Harry _was _hungry, though he usually waited until after noon on Saturday to eat. And the minute he had the information he needed in his possession, then he could go back to insulting Malfoy. In the meantime, he'd have a good breakfast.

So the finish of it all was that he kept quiet and followed Malfoy to a corner table. For some reason, Malfoy looked terribly pleased with himself as he sat down and tapped his hands together. Harry leaned forwards, bracing his elbows on the table—he ignored Malfoy's shudder when he did that—and glaring as menacingly as he could. "Talk."

"Please, Potter," said Malfoy, and drew out a white rose that, for some reason, he'd been carrying up his sleeve, to sniff it. "No one civilized talks about business before breakfast."

So Harry had to wait, fuming, whilst Tom brought the breakfasts and Malfoy sent his back because the toast was a bit burnt, and then whilst the breakfasts were brought again and Malfoy tasted his and hummed. He bit savagely into his own eggs, but it didn't hurry Malfoy. He _did _look up and raise a disgusted eyebrow when Harry gulped his tea. Then he gave Harry a stern look when he started to leave the fruit, both apples and oranges, on his plate. Harry glared back, but Malfoy had somehow acquired the knack of chiding him without even opening his mouth. Harry sighed and began to eat his apples. Malfoy returned to his own meal with every evidence of enjoyment.

At last he pushed his plate back, folded his hands behind his head, signaled lazily for more tea, waited until Tom had brought it, sipped from the cup, and then said, "Weasley did something stupid, Potter, and I saw it. He saw me, and I reckon he thinks I'm going to blackmail him, so he's probably trying to convince Granger they need to flee the country." He gave Harry a wide smile so full of amusement Harry blinked; he hadn't realized Malfoy could look that human. "She probably went with him to indulge him, but I think they'll only be gone until she can persuade him back. Still, there's a chance the word might get out. You need to let him know the word won't get out through me, and that I'll work to suppress it if anyone else does think it worthwhile to tell the story."

"_Why_, for God's sake?" Harry burst out. "You've never liked Ron, or me."

Malfoy made a sharp, cutting motion with his hand that seemed to signal Harry to keep his voice down, and then lowered his own voice impressively. "Because the person he did the stupid thing to thoroughly deserved it."

Harry, about to yell something else, blinked and sat back in his chair. "I'm listening."

"You remember Cormac McLaggen?" Malfoy was watching his face intently, as if, at the slightest hint that Harry didn't, he would decide Harry was working for the enemy.

It took Harry a moment to grasp the name, but then he nodded. That lump of a Gryffindor seventh-year who, in their sixth year, had done his very best to date Hermione and take Ron's place as Keeper on the Gryffindor team. "He was the one Ron—did something to?" Harry didn't think he had enough details to be sure of what his best friend was guilty of yet.

Malfoy nodded back. "Apparently, he'd been sending Granger lovestruck letters. He's done the same thing to various other women throughout the Ministry and the pure-blood circles he travels in." Malfoy's lip curled. "Broken up several relationships that I know of, because, somehow, he can make himself charming on paper."

Harry said nothing, but he was privately certain that Malfoy's relationship must be one of those McLaggen had broken up. Not that a woman would need much reason to want to leave Malfoy.

"Weasley confronted him on that new Quidditch pitch they've set up outside London," Malfoy said. "I was there to practice, but I stayed hidden and watched once I realized what was going on."

"Why?" Harry demanded, his suspicions rising again. It just seemed too good to be true that Malfoy had witnessed whatever had happened between Ron and McLaggen but didn't want anything for it.

"Because it looked like it would be entertaining, of course," Malfoy drawled. "Does your impeccable judgment find me virtuous enough to continue?"

Harry wavered for a moment, but had to admit that that sounded like a Malfoy motive, and not one he could really fault, since he'd done the same thing in his time. He nodded and gestured for Malfoy to go on.

"Thank you." Malfoy clasped his hand over his heart. "This moment of your approval is one that I'll treasure for the rest of my life." He continued before Harry could do more than growl impatiently. "So. Weasley threatened McLaggen. Of course, McLaggen said that he could make Granger choose him over Weasley at any time. That enraged Weasley enough that he cast the Detonator's Curse."

"He _didn't_," Harry gasped. They'd studied the Detonator's Curse in Auror training, of course, but only as one they needed to know so they could defend against it, never as one to cast. The curse burst the bones in the limbs of the target and left small pockets of explosive magic behind, so that any attempt to repair the bones for at least six months would result in their bursting in the same way.

"Of course he did." Malfoy lifted a finger as if he would tap Harry on the nose, but then lowered it again. Harry was glad. They might be sitting here and having a civil conversation under duress, but they were not close enough that Malfoy could touch him without being invited. "Why would I make that up?"

"To get Ron in trouble," Harry said automatically.

Malfoy threw himself against the back of his chair, which made Harry start because it didn't fit in with his collected, cool persona so far, and sighed through pursed lips. Then he began speaking as if his impatience were barely under control. "I've grown up, Potter, unlike you. I don't drink alcohol at ten in the morning. I no longer pin my heart on winning impossible Quidditch games against an opponent who outmatches me. And I'd appreciate it if you could acknowledge that I'm above getting people in trouble simply to get them in trouble. McLaggen displeased me because he realized that he had no chance of breaking up my relationship, so he sent me threatening letters instead of charming ones. I was glad enough to see him hurt that I never even considered reporting Weasley, all right?"

Harry blinked several times, trying to think about all the admissions that Malfoy had just made at once, and then managed to seize on the fact that most interested him at the moment, which didn't concern Malfoy acting adult or reasonable. "Why couldn't McLaggen break up your relationship?"

Malfoy bared his teeth, or smiled; they were the same thing with him, Harry thought. "He only dates women," he said simply.

Oh. _Oh_. Harry stared at Malfoy, who yawned widely and said, "If you plan to spring to your feet and run out of here screaming that I covert your lily-white arse, at least try to wait until after I'm done with my story."

Harry kept a cautious eye on him, but kept silent, too, mostly because he couldn't think of a bloody thing to say. That seemed good enough for Malfoy, who went on, "Weasley realized what he'd done the moment he did it. He panicked. Or haven't they taught you the spells that conceal magical signatures yet? Or perhaps they know better than to give trainee Aurors that kind of information. At any rate, the best thing he could think of to do was to Memory Charm McLaggen. And then he Apparated, I would presume home to his wife. No doubt he babbled out the relevant part of the story to her and they're off somewhere having a good hearty argument about what they should do."

"But you said he saw you?" Harry asked. He might not know what to say all the time, but he _did _remember Malfoy saying that was the catalyst for his seeking Harry out in the first place.

Malfoy smirked, a bit, but even that didn't seem to be as offensive as the sneers he'd used in the past. Harry reckoned he had to consider that Malfoy might have changed. A _little._ "I stepped out into the open because I had more faith in him than he deserved. Weasley's first attempt to Apparate failed, and so he saw me, and _then_ he shrieked and Apparated out. Tell him from me that he screams like a girl."

"I'd rather not, thanks," Harry said. "And you—you _really_ don't want him to go to Azkaban?" Use of the Detonator's Curse carried a six months' sentence at least. Harry knew he would be anxious to protect Ron from that, and even Hermione would, after a struggle with her sense of justice, but he couldn't comprehend Malfoy joining them among that small but select number.

Malfoy's eyes were distant for a moment, looking over Harry's head. "McLaggen should have got at least that for the letters he sent to me," he said quietly. "But because I am—who I am, and McLaggen has powerful connections, he didn't. I'm willing to protect the person who avenged me, however indirectly." He looked at Harry again and raised a familiar sardonic eyebrow. "It's just our misfortune that Weasley happened to be that person."

Harry hesitated, then held out his hand. Malfoy looked at it as if he might have invisible rat dung smeared on it.

"Come on, Malfoy," Harry said. "You've done my friend a good turn, and I _do_ believe you won't blab, given what you just told me about McLaggen." Besides, though Harry didn't know if Malfoy knew this, witnessing the use of a curse as Dark as the Detonator's Curse and not reporting it at once could cause one to be arrested as an accomplice, so there was that extra bit of security. "Shake on it?"

"There are some gestures I don't need, at this point in my life," said Malfoy, and rose and stalked away, as much on his offended dignity as a cat whose owner had just tried to put it in the bath.

Harry dropped his hand and blinked after Malfoy. It took him long moments to remember that time on the train when he'd turned away from Malfoy's hand in the same way.

He supposed the boy who had become the man might still have some of the boy's pride.

Strangely, Harry liked him better for it.

*

Harry came back to himself and smiled a little, shaking his head. He'd met with Malfoy several times after that, seeking to understand him as well as working out the protection of Ron's secret with him. Malfoy had continued to be that strange mixture of polite and prideful, adult with the child's vulnerabilities. He was one of the most _real _people Harry knew, because, in a way, one of the most unguarded. He had decided that he couldn't deny who he was or what he'd done during the war, because too many people already knew about it, and so instead he lived with it, which was more than Harry managed some days.

Harry had wanted to know him, and, finally, Draco had let Harry do so. They'd spent time together in serious conversation—Draco was the one who had taught Harry to have some taste in art and music, as well as patiently correcting his impression that he was the first person in the world to wonder about the meaning of life—but also in drunken midnight Quidditch races and, once Harry accepted that he liked to look at men himself, in appreciations of the way that certain men in Hogsmeade dressed, danced, and acted. And then Draco had moved to France and they'd stopped talking as regularly as before.

Harry stood straight and jammed a sheaf of papers, the reports of the cases that the dead Aurors had read, in the bag he was taking with him. He'd often enough felt inferior to Draco at certain specific things, but if there was something he _was _good at, it was understanding Dark curses and unraveling mysteries. And he was going to save Draco. He didn't believe Draco had cast a curse like this. He was probably as much a victim of it as the rest of the dead or injured people around him.

*

Draco sighed and leaned back against the wall of the shower. _This _was more like it. The water sluiced across him, hot and welcome, washing away not only the sweat but most of the aches that had sprung up in his muscles from running.

But what was he running from? That was the part that bewildered him. He couldn't remember, even though he'd been running from—it or them—for what felt like months.

Draco rubbed an arm tiredly across his face, then cursed as a few soapsuds got in his eyes. He'd try to remember later. For the moment, all he wanted was to tumble into bed. Even food could wait. He was weary of sleeping on roots and waking up with leaves in his hair.

Suddenly, the force and direction of the water changed. Draco gasped and stared up. He'd never known his shower to malfunction so badly.

And then he realized that he stood under a waterfall, next to a rocky cliff down which it splashed, and up to his ankles in a foaming pool it created. He backed up, looking around wildly. Yes, there were the heavy, shaggy trees looming on every side, the crooked roots tearing up the earth, the dark green leaves rustling menacingly—

Just the way he'd imagined it.

Draco felt a sob rising up his throat. What was happening to him? Was he going mad? Or if his enemies really were chasing him, who would drag him across the world to torment him?

And then he heard the creaks and snaps that told him the pursuers were hurtling through the forest towards him, as large as bears, as swift as wolves.

He scrambled out of the pool and began to run, dripping and naked, hungry and tired and terrified out of his wits.

And alone, so alone.


	3. Forest Primeval

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part III. Forest Primeval.**

"And you have to go alone?" Ron stared at Harry and spun a quill between his fingers. Harry thought he was probably three seconds away from offering to go with him.

"Yeah, I do." Harry reached out and clasped Ron's hand. "But I'll come back as soon as I can."

"That isn't much comfort, mate, given who you're going to hunt." Ron pulled his hand free and folded his arms, scowling. Harry knew how to tell when Ron was scared, though, and he knew how to respond. He and Ron hadn't had a serious argument in years.

"I know that," he said. "But—I always knew Draco better than you did. I spent so much time with him that I started quoting his opinions to you without realizing what I was doing, remember?"

Ron smiled for the first time since Harry had told him about his mission. "Yeah."

"So." Harry let out a harsh breath. "I think I would have noticed any signs of his turning to the Dark. I'm not _certain_, but I think so. I can't believe that he's responsible for this curse, or these attacks on the various people who've died, or whatever it really is. He's much more likely to be a victim, the way he was when Voldemort was trying to use him against his parents." Harry was distantly amused to see that the name still had the power to make Ron flinch and squirm in his seat.

"Just be careful," Ron said.

Harry nodded. He appreciated that Ron didn't offer to go with him, as much as he obviously wanted to. Both of them knew that his coming near Draco wasn't a good idea, since Ron hated him. Kingsley had chosen Harry to investigate this for his expertise in Dark magic—and he should have come to him in the first place, rather than giving it to incompetents, Harry thought rebelliously—but his friendship with Draco would make him more dedicated to this, and he wouldn't recommend killing Draco unless he found Draco eaten out from the inside, a shell with only Dark magic animating him. Ron was a good Auror, but he would be a hindrance in this situation.

And apparently he couldn't resist making one final attempt to persuade Harry to his point of view. "He could have changed since he went to France," Ron said, spinning the quill between his fingers again and keeping his voice elaborately casual, his eyes fixed on the desk. "Why did he move there, anyway? And why did you lose contact with him?"

"He went because there were still people in Britain who hated him for what happened during the war, and he had French relatives." Harry sighed. He had tried to talk Draco out of going, but Draco had flung back incidents from his everyday life at Harry that Harry had had no idea were happening, and in the end he'd been forced to agree with Draco's decision. "He thought he'd have a better life there. We stopped communicating just—because, I reckon. The way that most long-term relationships drift apart. The owls got fewer and fewer, and when he did write, it was in French half the time. He wanted to forget England, he told me. The last letter he sent me told me he was probably going to be out of communication for a long time, because he wanted to think about his life without any outside interference."

"Some wizards become Dark with less prompting than that," Ron said, just loudly enough for Harry to overhear.

"I know." Harry ran a hand through his hair and turned towards the door again, slinging the bag on his shoulder higher. "But I want to rescue him if I can."

"If you can't?"

Harry paused with one hand on the doorway and glanced back at Ron. "Then that's something I'll simply have to accept."

This time, Ron saluted him, a motion of his hand that looked entirely ironic but which Harry knew wasn't. Ron had had a lot of proof in the last few years how Harry could deal with the consequences of situations he didn't like and live with them, if he had to. The fact that he wasn't ever going to marry Ginny, the way that he couldn't escape his fame, his inability to persuade Draco to give up some of his attitudes about blood…Harry was better at compromise in the face of inevitability than he had been when he'd sacrificed his life to stop Voldemort, and Ron knew it.

"Good luck," Ron muttered.

Harry nodded once more, waved, then stepped out and let the door of Ron's office thump shut behind him.

*

_If I were a Draco running scared of a curse on me that I couldn't interpret and couldn't control, where would I go?_

Harry stood calm and relaxed in the middle of the Wiltshire field that Auror Brinsley had actually been killed in, to read the reports of the Unspeakables who had handled his body. He had his eyes closed, but he could hear the small sounds of grass rustling and a single loud bird calling _cheep-cheeeer, cheep-cheeeer_ well enough. This was a protected wizarding area, meant as a place where the wizards of several counties could come together and negotiate local property laws, so he couldn't hear Muggle vehicles.

_If I was a Draco who caused death and didn't want to cause death, where would I go?_

The natural place to start would have been in France, but Harry, even though he'd looked carefully through the last letters that Draco had sent him, couldn't find the names of his French relatives. And it would be less productive than doing nothing to wander around France. Kingsley wanted the decision to take or spare Draco's life made quickly. Harry would ensure that it was, even though he also knew his choice would fall on the side of "spare" no matter what.

_If I was a Draco who had already had three Aurors come after me and didn't understand why, where would I go?_

Harry opened his eyes. He had settled his mind enough that he could feel the vibrations of subtle magic in the roots of the grass, a spell cast to keep it trimmed and free of weeds. For a moment, he entertained amusing thoughts of what Snape would say if he could see him now. "Clearing your mind" didn't mean to him what it did to Harry.

But such thoughts interfered with his smooth hunting, so Harry banished them and began to walk in a circle. All the while, he extended his sensitivity to magic outwards around him in a series of overlapping concentric rings, now and then pausing so that he could pay attention to his breathing or the motions of his legs. Falling too far into the trance that powered this method of hunting had the effect, sometimes, of making him fall over in cramps or stop breathing.

He couldn't really explain how he did this, except that it had something to do with the curse scar and the legacy remaining from his dying to stop Voldemort. _The only gift I ever got from the old bastard, _he thought, but he kept the thought light, skimming along the surface of his mind like a water-strider on the surface of a pond. No breaking the trance. No breaking the trance…

He could sense Dark magic easily, and often follow the track of a spell to its source, as long as the trace wasn't more than a month old. It was as if the protection that he had briefly granted all of Hogwarts against Voldemort's spells had turned inside out and now was a means of detecting where such "innocence," untainted by curses, was and where it wasn't. He had caught more Dark wizards that way than any other, since his trance seemed to break through the most elaborate wards and spell-protections they cast around the sites of their deeds to keep them "safe."

Any moment now, he should feel the Dark magic that had slaughtered Roger Brinsley. Any moment now. Any moment now…

His traveling awareness reached the edge of the field, and spread beyond it into the territory of Malfoy Manor and the surrounding Muggle areas. Still Harry kept pacing, though now and then he paused so as not to make himself dizzy. He could push his sensitivity further than this, if it were needed.

_Funny._ He really had thought he would encounter the operation of the curse by now. To his feeling for Dark magic, a curse was a curse, and it didn't matter whether it was intentionally cast or carried by the kind of Curse-Bearer that Kingsley had talked about. The death had definitely taken place in this field, and he should have experienced the violence of it as a series of disgusting shivers across his skin.

And then he caught—

Something.

Harry wanted to pivot towards it and cast a spell that would sharpen his senses so he could fix the moment more easily in memory, but he refrained. He had lost traces by doing something that impulsive. Instead, he kept his breathing light and loose and calm, his mind still bubbling with thoughts, and drew his wand with his right hand. He spent long moments contemplating the grass at his feet before he flicked his wand, twice, and made the world come into shining, crystalline focus.

Yes. A trace of alien power crackled across the grass blades and dripped from their tips like dew. Harry started to smile triumphantly, but at the last moment, he had to give it up and concentrate on the magic again.

_What is this?_

It didn't feel like any other curse he'd ever encountered. It didn't have the taint of the Unforgivables, or the layered sense, like biting into a cake, of Dark magic mingled with simple hexes and jinxes that was one of the more sophisticated hiding techniques. Harry didn't even sense what he had begun to think was the likeliest explanation, the bristling, sword-sharp bouquet of so many spells cast at once that they turned into a writhing tangle.

And yet, there was something maddeningly familiar about it.

_What is this?_

Harry dropped into a crouch and reached out to brace himself on the grass, his fingers spread. He widened his nostrils and closed his eyes again; sight was too distracting at a moment like this. He gave himself up to the subtle scents of sunlight, crushed grass, a musky insect, a hidden flower—

And the magic. It had a trace of almonds, of burnt sugar, of cinnamon. Harry sniffed again, and then his eyes popped open.

Sweet scents were associated with magic that wizards in general thought of as innocent—the pranks of children, in other words. But this scent was too strong for a simple prank spell, and it would have taken a great many of those spells to kill Brinsley, and there was no trace of them left, anyway.

Powerful, killing magic with innocent intent fit only one profile.

_Wild magic. _

No one had asked, in any of the reports Harry had read, whether Draco might be carrying a suddenly manifested wild talent instead of a curse.

As Harry's initial impulse to dance around in circles and yell to the skies faded, though, he realized he still had a problem. What talent could Draco be carrying? He was thirty, just like Harry was. Most wild talents would have showed up before then. The rare ones that appeared long after puberty were _always _linked to both a family bloodline and a traumatic experience. Harry couldn't have said what Draco might have suffered in France—

_And why the fuck didn't I insist on communicating with him, still? I should have. I should have. Even if he had a new life over there, he could have taken the time to answer a letter from me now and then._

—but he had studied the Malfoy bloodline before, when he was on a case where Lucius Malfoy was a suspect. No wild talents there. No signs of one, in eighteen generations of Malfoys.

Harry had no doubt that his suspicion about the wild magic was correct. However, it really left him no closer to an answer than before. What Draco might be doing, or feeling, or experiencing, at the moment was still beyond his ken.

_But it's possible that I missed something before. The Ministry's records on the Malfoy line could be fragmentary. Luckily, I'm not far from a place where they would surely have more information, and I think the house-elves would still remember me and let me in. _Harry knew he couldn't count on a human presence at Malfoy Manor, since Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy had given up living there; it was too easy for anti-Death Eater activists to target them.

Harry still remembered the Apparition coordinates of Malfoy Manor well enough. He oriented himself in the right direction to face the house, closed his eyes in intense concentration for a moment, and then Apparated.

*

_I got them wrong. How did I get those coordinates wrong when I spent every Sunday for two years of my life with Draco?_

Harry spent a long few minutes staring around him incredulously. Then he shook his head. One thing Draco had helped him get over was his tendency to insist that reality must be wrong and substitute his own conclusions for it. If he had landed in the wrong place, then his Apparition had been at fault. It wasn't like the Manor had a will of its own and could move around.

Harry drew his wand and moved cautiously forwards, glancing from side to side. From the looks of it, he was in an old forest, the trees hundreds of feet tall and practically interlacing their branches; not much sunlight escaped to the floor. Harry had to cast _Lumos _before long. His feet shuffled and thrashed through piles of dead and decaying leaves, which irritated him, but Stealth and Tracking classes had never covered how to move quietly in a place like this. He couldn't move fast, either, because, although there was little undergrowth, the heavy crooked roots and the trailing strands of ivy around the trunks and the holes the leaves concealed were more than enough to trip him.

He compared the forest with several images in his head of other forests in Britain and had to discard them all. _Not the Forest of Dean, either, _he concluded at the end of his list. _So either I somehow Apparated to the Continent—and I know that can't happen—or this place is magical. I think I'll take a local violation of magical law over magical law suddenly bending enough that inter-continental Apparition is possible._

Noises came and went around him. Harry could hear the scrape of what sounded like claws on bark, the chatter of birds that made the one in the field in Wiltshire sound positively polite, and, once, a howl that made his hair stand on end. He knew the sound. He'd hunted werewolves before.

_Except that it's not a full moon night, it's still day, and so it can't be werewolves, _he reassured himself. _Real wolves, maybe. _

_But who knows if that particular magical law holds here?_

At last, after he'd wandered for perhaps twenty minutes without finding a clue to the forest's true nature, the sound of water caught his ears. Harry turned down a faint path, probably made by deer, and cursed softly as he tripped over yet another root. _Kingsley would be sure they'd wasted time and money on my training if he could see me now, _he thought.

He came out on a sloping bank that led down to the river. Harry eyed the bank and cast a spell that would turn the steep slide of earth, mud, and leaves into a smooth ramp.

Correction, he thought, as he watched his spell fade and die. _Should _have turned the bank into a smooth ramp. The magic simply vanished the moment it touched the raw material of the forest itself.

Grimacing, he nevertheless forced himself to experiment in the careful way they had taught him during Auror training so he could learn the boundaries of the forest's magical protection. There seemed to be one simple rule. Spells that were meant to work on him, like the _Lumos _on his wand or the spell that kept his glasses stuck firmly to his face no matter what, still worked. Anything meant to affect the forest didn't, even a powerful explosive curse that Harry hurled at the ground straight in front of him.

_And Hermione would say I was stupid for doing that, _he thought, stepping over the place where the explosion hadn't happened. _But at least now I know. And I'll just have to do this the hard way._

Scrambling, scrabbling, and threatening the uncaring air and dirt, Harry slid down the bank to the river. He ran a hand through the water, and shook his head. He couldn't tell anything by that. Cold, _looking _pure but he wouldn't want to drink it, flowing rapidly over small rocks in a direction that looked like south or maybe west, except he couldn't tell for certain because the trees were so closely bunched and he'd always been shite at compass spells…it could still have been almost any river in Europe, or maybe Britain. No chance of telling what it looked like when it was at home.

He scooped up a handful of water and cast a purifying spell at it, hoping that would work on a piece of the forest separated from the rest of its natural environment. No. The water trickled through his unresisting fingers and back into the stream, unaffected.

Harry grumbled under his breath and stepped back into the narrow path that ran between the stream and the bank, then did his best to orient himself by the sun and went in the direction he thought was west. He didn't know if he would find anything there, but he ought at least to explore before Apparating out—assuming the forest would let him, but it should. An unexpected forest in the place of Malfoy Manor might have something to do with whatever had happened to Draco.

_Unlikely, _Harry could almost hear Kingsley saying. He rolled his eyes. Well, he would feel untrue to himself and his friend if he didn't investigate it anyway.

The scenery rolled past him, unchanging. More river, more trees, more roots, more darkness. Of course, there were probably all sorts of subtleties that he couldn't see because he wasn't a forest connoisseur. Harry snorted a little and picked up his pace as a particularly loud creak came from the branches next to him.

The creak came again. Harry stopped, glanced around for a boulder or tree to put his back against, cursed himself for following the river _this _closely, and then lifted his wand anyway, even though he wondered what good spells would do against a creature he couldn't attack.

The thing blundered into sight. Harry stared. He was expecting a werewolf, a deer with pointed hooves and fangs, maybe even one of the cluster of Dark wizards who might be responsible for the forest's existence in the first place…

But not this.

"Draco?" he demanded.

*

Draco jerked to a stop, trying to breathe, but he'd run too far, too fast. His sides ached, and his feet ached, and his hands were torn and scratched and scarred, and he could see his own blood running even when he looked away from them.

His pursuers were still chasing him.

But now one of them was ahead of him, at the stream that Draco had counted on to carry him away from the two horrible creatures behind.

He began to back up, shaking his head. He didn't know why it should be so much more horrible to hear this creature speak his name than it was to hear the threatening growls of the others, but it was.

"Draco?" The creature splashed out of the water towards him. Draco had trouble seeing it. Its body was a dim, cloudy whirlwind, but it definitely had claws on the ends of its arms, and its teeth stood out from its head like pins of silver and gnashed and clashed together. "Don't you know me? It's Harry."

And _now_ they'd stolen the name of a friend from his past to get to him.

Draco decided, abruptly, that he was tired of this. He'd been chased from place to place for months, harassed and hurt and nearly killed, and he couldn't remember what he had done to deserve this. Maybe he'd committed _some _crime, but if so, the creatures never allowed him to talk about it and never seemed interested in mercy.

He'd had enough.

He lowered his head and charged the creature in front of him.

They went over backwards into the stream, and Draco heard the creature shout. It did have a perfect imitation of Harry's voice, he decided. But that didn't mean it _was _Harry.

He raised his hands, found its neck, and began to choke the thing.


	4. Bleak and Barren and Burning

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part IV. Bleak and Barren and Burning**

Harry tripped and fell into the water when Draco began strangling him, and for a long moment, the surprise was so great that he just lay there gaping and gasping and letting Draco do it.

Then he decided that, friend or not, no one was killing him _that _easily.

A quick spell sent a jolt of harmless electricity up Draco's arms and made him flinch back, his hands momentarily losing their grip. Harry pushed hard at his chest, and Draco fell away from him into the water. Then Harry, deciding that he wasn't about to take any chances, cast a Body-Bind that tied Draco's arms to his sides.

Draco thrashed madly, his mouth open, his eyes bulging. Harry climbed slowly to his feet, never taking his eyes off Draco even when he stumbled on the stones in the river. He raised a hand to touch his throat, and swallowed again and again. Had Draco _really _gone mad? Had he killed the Aurors who came after him? It was seeming much more likely than it had just a few minutes ago.

Harry took a deep breath, then, and forced himself to calm down, the way he'd often had to after seeing Ron wounded on a joint mission. He wouldn't get any answers by standing around and worrying until he went out of his mind. He would just have to ask Draco questions and hope that they got somewhere against Draco's obvious madness.

"Draco?" he said, quietly, because speaking loudly right now would agitate Draco further. "Are you all right?"

Draco glared at him, his eyes more furious than Harry had ever seen them, even after Harry had accidentally insulted a bloke he didn't know Draco fancied. Harry stared back for a moment, then remembered that the Body-Bind would have frozen Draco's jaw as well. He winced and undid the spell enough to let Draco talk.

Draco licked his lips twice, then said, "I don't know how you stole my friend's voice, but I'll never believe you're him, no matter what you sound like."

_He's worse than I thought. _Harry had to take another breath to keep the concern and sympathy from eating him alive. "I really am Harry," he said, when he thought he could speak steadily. "I came to find you, Draco." He thought about telling him that Kingsley had commanded this, but discarded the notion. Draco might not even realize he'd killed the Aurors, and any reference to being hunted by the Ministry would bring up memories of the war. Harry didn't think he needed to deal with those on top of the curse afflicting him. "Can you tell me what happened? Was it someone in France who cast this curse on you?"

"Curse?" Draco laughed harshly. "Being chased all over the world is a _curse _instead of torture?" Then he shook his head and dragged himself as much upright as he could whilst he was still in the Body-Bind. "Not that you need to know anything about that," he hissed, "considering you were one of those who cast the curse yourself."

"Assume I don't know." Harry waved his wand and raised one stone above the surface of the water so he could sit down in relative comfort. True, he could have moved to the bank, but that would have involved getting further away from Draco than he felt ready to do at the moment. "Assume I'm some new enemy that the rest hired to torment you."

Draco's eyes squeezed shut, and his head tilted forwards, as if hearing the request had taken the last of his strength. Harry winced again and held himself still by main force of will. _You can't do anything until you know what his perception of this is. Don't rush. You make mistakes when you rush. You want to hug him right now, but maybe he'd just think you were some giant spider trying to build a web around him._

"You've been chasing me for months," Draco whispered. "I was stolen from my bed, from my _home_, in the middle of the night. I've run through forests to get away from them, through swamps and icefields, but they're always right behind me. Sometimes they let me get food and rest, but that's just because they want to continue chasing me for longer, to kill me right when I'm on the edge of hope. I _know _that's the reason." He shivered and made a motion as if he would wrap his arms around himself, but the Body-Bind still held them tight. "The worst…the worst was a time when I had to run across the desert, freezing in the night and then burning when the sun came up. I was delirious for three weeks from that, and they didn't wait until I was recovered to pursue me."

An enormous surge of wild magic rippled out from Draco just as Harry was opening his mouth to respond. Harry grabbed his rock as the trees wavered like curtains around them and the stream spluttered to a halt. And then the rock was gone, and the landscape bowed and waved up and down, and Harry nearly broke his neck thrashing frantically towards Draco to take him in his arms and shield him from whatever was happening. He'd never felt magic like this; his own accidental bursts that had blown up Aunt Marge and transported him to the roof of his school were nothing in comparison. He understood now how not only the Aurors but multiple people around Draco could have died.

And then the rippling stopped, and Harry felt a pulse of heat on his head. He looked up and around in disbelief.

He knelt in the middle of a desert, a hot, flat, white pan of ground with dunes arching on either side of him, their sides sculpted by enormous winds. The sun stood directly overhead, at noon, though Harry knew it had been later than that when he'd Apparated to Malfoy Manor. The heat pressed down like an overturned pot lid on his back, and Harry could feel sweat start along the curves of his shoulders and chest.

Draco stood up in front of him, Body-Bind dissipated by the wild magic as if it had never existed, and stared around with a hunted expression. Then he screamed, turned, and began to lurch over the ground in a random direction.

Harry cursed softly and cast a Cushioning Charm at the sand ahead of Draco, a Cooling Charm, and another Body-Bind in rapid succession. Draco fell over as his limbs stiffened up again, but the cooled sand caught and cradled him, so that he wouldn't get scraped or have his skin abraded. His face was wild with fear, though. Staring at him, Harry felt almost helpless. He had no idea what was wrong with Draco or how to help, and all his instincts were _urging_ him to help, telling him he was useless if he didn't.

_First things first. _Harry had to ensure that they survived the desert for the length of time it might take them to find a way out. He cast a Cooling Charm on himself, then conjured water and poured it over his head. A second _Aguamenti _charm thoroughly wet Draco. He spluttered and stared at Harry in amazement.

"Sorry," Harry muttered. He wondered for a moment what Draco's delusions told him had happened, and then put that out of his head. _First things first. _

He stepped up to Draco, Levitated him into the air, took his arm so that he could lead him gently along, and then, concentrating on home with all his might, tried to Apparate there.

Nothing happened.

Harry paused for long moments. Of course, the desert had already proved itself different from the forest in that Harry could enchant parts of it. But he did wish the differences didn't extend to keeping them captive when they tried to Apparate out.

_Try again before you panic, _he chided himself. _Maybe your home is too far away from this place, wherever it is. Wild magic that powerful could have put you into the Sahara for all you know._

He focused on Malfoy Manor, making his mind as calm as possible. Being back in the forest would be an improvement over this.

And again nothing happened, not even the shuddering jangle in his own body that Harry had become accustomed to when he overestimated his own power and tried to Apparate too far. The desert stayed the same around them, the sun broiling down and the sand shimmering obliquely in the distance. Draco had closed his eyes and let his head fall forwards, sweat rolling from his temples.

Harry shut his own eyes.

*

By the end of the day, as the sun began to sink behind the dunes, Harry had learned a number of things about the desert.

The first was that they couldn't Apparate anywhere within it, never mind outside it. When Harry had focused carefully on one dune to the north and then tried to bring himself and Draco there, the landscape had shuddered a bit, but they'd stayed standing on flat ground. And yet, Harry couldn't be _absolutely _certain that this was an inherent property of the desert. Apparition relied on a wizard's internal picture of the place he was trying to go. Maybe, because Harry had no training in deserts, his magic couldn't work because he couldn't distinguish the one dune clearly enough from the others. It was maddening.

The second was that they might be anywhere on earth. No matter how long they walked or in what direction, Harry saw no distinguishing features that matched any desert geography he had ever learned or heard vaguely about. The wild magic had been extraordinarily powerful; there was no way to gauge what it might or might not be able to do.

The third was that, whilst Harry's wand kept them safely hydrated and cool during the day, and then warm at night, it could do nothing about giving them food. Harry had never mastered the Transfiguration spells that would let him turn something else into food, and of course conjuring it out of thin air was impossible. And without food, his magical strength would lapse eventually, and leave them exposed to all the dangers of heat and thirst.

Harry finally had located a projecting stone that had a shallow hole near the bottom, more like a scrape than a cave. He'd laid Draco within it and arranged Draco's tattered robes around him so that they shielded him as much as possible before he cast the Warming Charm. Then he lay down next to Draco and turned to watch the desert. His wand was already stuck to his hand with another spell. Harry wasn't about to let wind or wild beasts snatch it away in the night.

Draco had said nothing all day, even when Harry removed the Body-Bind on his jaw so he could drink. Now and then he stared at Harry as if Harry were demented or possibly a Dementor, but if he had opinions on the strange behavior of one of the "creatures chasing him," he kept that to himself.

Harry stared out into the desert, squinting and then widening his eyes, sniffing as much as he could, and listening intently. There were ways to pierce an illusion by exercising the senses well enough, and he'd learned some in Auror training. On the off chance that the wild magic had created a glamour of a desert around them instead of actually transporting them to one, Harry wanted to dissipate it.

Draco finally spoke when a very real-looking moon had soared above the stone and was casting frosty light down on the sand. "You're taking care of me."

"Trying to, yes," Harry said absently. Was the shadow of the dune in front of them different than it had been a moment ago? He didn't think so, but he couldn't stop hoping. "I'm sorry I can't get you any food."

"But the creatures never try to take care of me," Draco whispered. Harry heard him stirring within the confines of the Body-Bind. Without looking away from the desert and anything that might try to sneak up on him, Harry picked up his wand and cast a spell that would loosen the Body-Bind enough that Draco could be a little more comfortable. "They're never nice to me. They never say sorry."

"I'm not a creature."

Draco scoffed. "Of course you are."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm not."

They repeated the words a few times each, an exercise that Harry found almost soothing, though he knew that they were probably wasting water as they talked. At least it was an improvement over Draco screaming that Harry wanted to hurt him or running as though a nundu was after him.

"Maybe you're not a creature," Draco said suddenly. "They always hunt in packs or at least pairs, and I haven't seen anything but you since we got here."

"Where _are _we, anyway?" Harry rolled over and looked at Draco with interest. He hadn't asked before because he thought it was just as likely that Draco wasn't seeing a desert, or not the same desert, with the delusions that seemed to hover behind his eyes. But the answer to the question was at least worth checking out, as Hermione and Kingsley would no doubt have reminded him before now.

"The same desert we always are in when you chase me here," said Draco, his voice dull and weary in a way that made Harry frown. "Dry, barren, and almost featureless except for those damn dune and a few rocks like these." He reached out and brushed his hand against the rock arch above him, which made Harry frown further. _If Draco can see the same landscape I do, why can't he see me as a person?_ "This is the part of the journey I hate most, because you never let me stop to drink or rest."

"The journey?" Harry eased himself closer, then paused when he saw the way Draco stiffened.

"From place to place," Draco whispered. "You're always hunting me. You're always hurting me. It never _matters _to you, that I might have a life to get back to like anyone else." He turned eyes full of fury and hatred on Harry suddenly. It took an effort for Harry to remain curled up in the sand as close as he was. "I hate you."

Harry rubbed his shoulder absently; it felt as though some poisoned dart had stung him, though he knew that was ridiculous. Draco couldn't help what he was saying. If anything, Harry should feel bad that he hadn't gone after Draco before, or hadn't asked more questions when the letters stopped coming. "I care," he said, and decided that he might as well do some investigating, if neither of them was going to sleep. "Tell me about the life that you want to get back to. What were you doing just before the chase began?"

Draco lowered his head to the ground, closing his eyes in an obviously fake parody of someone going to sleep. "As if I would tell you that, and let you give the creatures more ways to torment me."

"But maybe the creatures are getting bored," Harry said. "And aren't you tired, anyway, of this endless chase? Wouldn't a different kind of torment at least make your life a bit more livable?"

Draco tensed, but didn't say anything for long moments. Harry waited with some confidence. Draco had been vulnerable to absurd arguments like this in the past; he couldn't resist the temptation to make Harry look foolish by practicing his own "Slytherin" cunning.

"You know all about it anyway," Draco said at last. "You were the ones who chased me out of the house. You were the ones who came to me after I'd been doing something completely innocuous and started this as revenge for God knows what crime."

Harry controlled his breathing. Maybe he was getting close to an answer, yes, but it could as easily be another of Draco's delusions. He didn't exactly count as a trustworthy witness after the way he'd tried to strangle Harry. "But what were you doing? I don't know. And I don't want to hurt you."

"You stole his voice," Draco whispered. "You sound like Harry, but you aren't him. I think I should distrust you most of all."

"I'm here to rescue you," Harry said. "I don't want to hurt you." He hesitated, wondering if he should continue playing one of Draco's creatures to build on the arguments he'd already started, and then threw caution to the winds. It was more important for Draco to believe, if he could, that he had one friend in this nightmarish world with him. "Draco, I _am _Harry, and I promise, I'll do what I can to get you out of here. But I don't understand how we got into the desert, and I've never seen one of the creatures chasing you. To understand, I have to know what you were doing just before the chase started, what might have caused the creatures to notice you."

Draco shivered as if he were cold. Harry cast another Warming Charm, and scowled at the desert sky. Any other environment, except perhaps an actual icefield, would be easier to survive in.

"I was meditating on the history of my family," Draco said, and then added, in a haughty tone, his eyes shut, "This doesn't mean I trust you. I am bored of being chased all the time, though. Maybe you can use my own failures against me to try and torment me now."

Harry smiled and resisted, barely, the temptation to reach out and stroke his hand across Draco's forehead. If Draco was seeing his hand as a paw with talons or worse, then Harry would only panic him where he meant to comfort. But Draco was—well, rather cute when he acted like this. "All right. You were meditating on the history of your family. And then what happened?"

"I had got into a deep trance state that one of the books I read said was necessary to summon the ghosts of your ancestors." Draco was speaking normally, rather than trying to whisper and make his voice sound all spectral the way he did sometimes when talking about pure-blood traditions to Harry, but Harry still felt a shiver run over his skin. This was the center of the secret of what had happened to Draco, he was certain, and therefore what had happened to the Aurors and the other victims. "I could see them lined up in front of me like portraits, and I could walk a corridor between them. I reached out and touched the face of a woman. I think she was my grandmother's grandmother. She opened her eyes and said something to me; I can't remember what it was. Then the whole world went shiny and dark and silvery, and I wished I was somewhere else, and the chase started."

Harry frowned and concentrated as hard as he could on what he'd read of wild magic, but the memories were years old. The Auror trainees had studied it briefly. Their instructors didn't think they needed to know much about it compared to Dark magic and common jinxes. Other departments in the Ministry were more likely to deal with the results of children's accidental magic, which were the most common form of wild magic and rarely deadly. If silver light meant anything special, then Harry couldn't remember what it was.

So perhaps the answer might lie in Draco's other words.

But he couldn't remember anything about a corridor of ancestors, either, or ancestors being ghosts, and though he'd studied the Malfoy line, he didn't remember the particular name or attributes of Draco's great-great-grandmother—

_Oh_.

Abruptly, Harry felt extraordinarily stupid. He'd assumed without thinking about it that Lucius's family was the only possible source of clues, but Draco had had two parents. Perhaps he had inherited a wild magic talent from one of his Black ancestors.

It still didn't explain the talent manifesting so late in Draco's life, or why a ritual that should have been safe would have produced it. (And Harry knew Draco wouldn't have chanced a ritual that wasn't safe, no matter how desperate he was to know something about his family. After Voldemort, Draco had a prejudice against most Dark Arts that rivaled Harry's own). But it gave him a new direction to look in.

And then he felt more stupid still.

"You wished you were somewhere else," he said carefully.

"Yes, I just said that," Draco said irritably. "Along with Harry's voice, you managed to steal his capacity for not paying much attention to anything around him."

"The way you mentioned a desert right before we appeared here." Harry slapped himself in the forehead, then winced, because it hurt. "I'm stupid. I should have put the clues together before now. You're transporting yourself to other places somehow, when you think about them hard enough."

"I'm not doing it." Draco had folded himself up into a ball, and his voice was a soft growl. "How can I be the one doing it, when the creatures are chasing me from place to place? Why wouldn't I imagine a comfortable place and keep myself there?"

"I don't know that yet," Harry said, and smiled at him, because he felt more optimistic at the moment than he had since he started the case. "And I'm not sure why you see me as a creature, either. But at least I know that we can get out of the desert. You haven't died here yet, so I think your body and mind probably cooperate to get you out of danger when there's a large chance you'll be permanently hurt. As long as I stay with you, then I'll probably go along with you when you transport yourself."

Draco folded his arms and glared at him. Harry understood. Draco had never liked being blamed for anything, even those things he acknowledged that he fully deserved to be blamed for. He would hate the idea that maybe he'd been responsible for his own plight all along, and therefore, he could have stopped it at any time.

The thing was, Harry didn't think he really could have stopped it. The delusion about Harry, and maybe about the creatures, if they existed at all, argued that something else ran under the simple concept of wild magic that could transport someone from place to place. The Aurors had died somehow. So had the other people blinded or crippled or maddened by their exposure to Draco's peculiar magic.

"If what you say is true," Draco said, "then I should be able to wish myself back into Malfoy Manor."

*

The world shifted and melted. The creature who had Harry's voice reached out and clutched at him, and Draco ducked, shoving his face into his arm, though he knew it wouldn't do a bit of good against those cutting claws.

But the beast didn't scratch him. Instead, it only gently held him, and the next moment the sand had faded and they were lying on sheets that felt like silk—the familiar, perfumed silk of Malfoy Manor—against Draco's skin.

Draco took a few moments to gasp softly, new thoughts flooding his head. He had been home before he appeared in the forest, and naked. If the creatures were really chasing him and controlled where he went, why would they have left him go home at all? He had assumed they were doing it to hold out a promise of rest and then torment him by snatching it away, but they couldn't be both that subtle and the mindless beasts he'd been considering them all along. And why would they have clothed him in robes?

And now he was home.

With the creature that had Harry's voice, and that seemed to understand the helpless way Draco stared at the familiar walls of his room.

"We'll find out the truth," it said. "Now that we're here, with a library, we can try and locate the source of the wild magic that's dragging you from place to place. It's under your control, but not completely."

"I did this," Draco whispered. "I still did this." Dread began to pile in on him as he wondered if any of the creatures had been other people, if he had hurt them when they ran after him.

"Not all of it." The creature laid a claw gently on his shoulder. The face, featureless except for the teeth, leaned towards him. Draco shuddered, and it stopped moving, but the voice was still soft and caressing. "I'll stay with you and keep you safe, Draco."

It took Draco quite a lot of trust to believe that voice, considering the body and face it emanated from, but it had been so long since he had hope that he was willing to lean even on the shoulder of a beast.


	5. At Home

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part V. At Home**

Harry extended the letter gingerly to the great horned owl he had discovered in the Manor's Owlery. Maybe it was stupid of him, but he hadn't quite got over the distrust of his surroundings that traveling with Draco had inspired. "Can you carry this to Kingsley Shacklebolt?" he asked.

The owl fixed him with one implacable golden eye. It couldn't speak, but Harry could _see _its scorn. He swallowed, gave it a shame-faced grin, and then extended the letter again. The owl snatched it, spread its wings, and soared out the Owlery window with, of course, absolute silence.

It was a gray day, with clouds crowding in from all corners of the sky, but a single shaft of sunlight did manage to fall on the Manor. Harry rested his elbows on the windowsill and looked up at it, frowning.

He had looked through most of the likely-looking books in the ground floor Manor library yesterday whilst Draco bathed and slept and ate and, in general, recovered from the chase that had led him through the desert and the forest. Harry hadn't been able to locate a mention of any wild talent in the Black family that resembled the one Draco had. Today he was going to try the less likely-looking books, and scan the ones on curses and Dark Arts—which were enough to fill five solid-looking shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling in the upstairs library—on the off chance that Draco's recollections were bad and they were dealing with Dark magic instead of wild magic after all.

_It could still be a curse. His ancestor could have cursed him. You don't know that she didn't._

But there was so little to go on. Harry had urged Draco to remember as much he could of the ritual he had conducted, and he had said he would try, but the doubtful, despairing look on his face had quashed Harry's hopes effectively. And though Harry knew Draco needed time to recover, he was nervous that one day hadn't produced much of a chance in Draco's mood. He was still unable to see Harry as human, unable to remember exactly what had caused him to start running in the first place.

_What if he doesn't recover?_

At that, Harry straightened and shook his head. He wasn't going to start thinking like _that._ If he didn't know anything about the curse or the wild talent haunting Draco, then he couldn't say for certain that it would never dissipate.

And until he saw some indubitable sign of that, he would go on fighting and trying to make Draco recognize him. He would drag Draco out of the swamp of mental illness on his back if he had to.

_It's not going to consume my friend without a fight. I can fight if he can't._

Harry turned and left the Owlery with brisk steps. If he hurried, he should be able to catch Draco in the breakfast room and try one more time to drag him back to sanity before Harry lost himself in books for the day and Draco lost himself in staring at the wall.

*

Draco sat at the table in the breakfast room, staring at the quarter of grapefruit in front of him. Now and then he took a bite, but most of the time, he seemed about as enthusiastic as Harry remembered Dudley being when Aunt Petunia had put him on a diet. Sometimes he shuddered as if it were taking him an effort just to sit in front of the food and not circle the room, looking about for pursuers.

_I have to show him that he doesn't have anything to fear. Or, at least, nothing to fear from me. _Harry still had no idea if any of Draco's enemies had ever been real.

"Draco," he said softly.

At once, Draco leaped out of his chair and faced the door, his breath coming fast but an almost grateful expression on his face, as if he were happy the worst had come at last. He blinked and caught himself with one hand on the table when he realized it was Harry standing there, then turned his head disconsolately away. "It's you," he said.

"Yes." Harry paused, then asked gently, "Has a second night made any difference in how you see me?"

"No," Draco whispered. "You still look like a whirlwind with teeth and claws. A little like a bear, but less solid."

Harry nodded and edged around Draco to get his own breakfast, which the house-elves had made and left thoughtfully on a smaller table Harry could imagine Lucius or Narcissa using to hold business correspondence. A piece of toast, eggs, and his own grapefruit, with orange juice; Harry had never had the time or the need in the last few years for elaborate meals, unless he was celebrating with his friends or similar. He bit into the toast and asked through the mouthful, "Is grapefruit all you're eating?"

Draco wrinkled his nose. "Don't speak with your mouth full, Harry or whoever you are," he said sharply. "That's disgusting."

Harry openly grinned, despite the pieces of toast he knew were stuck in his teeth. Draco wouldn't be able to see them with the delusion obscuring his face, anyway. As if Draco still knew what he was doing, he rolled his eyes and turned away.

_I want to make him exasperated and irritated. That's the surest way to bring him back to normal. _Harry took another bite and said, "I don't want you falling down on me later in the day because of low blood sugar. Is that all you're eating?"

"You still talk like a Muggle," Draco said. "Blood sugar this and blood pressure that." He picked up the grapefruit and took another bite. "There. Are you happy?"

"No," Harry said. "I'm never happy. Ask anyone. I'm the grouchy Auror of the Department, they'll tell you."

Draco looked down, but not before Harry had seen the corner of his mouth twitch up in a smile.

"And," Harry went on, "that doesn't answer my question. Did you eat something other than that? Are you prepared for a long day of research?"

"Why should I be the one doing the research?" Draco picked up a piece of grapefruit and threw it moodily across the kitchen. Harry winced as it hit the wall with a wet smack, then wondered why. The Malfoys had house-elves; they would take care of it. He reckoned that having a succession of partners who'd been much more obsessed with neatness than he ever was had conditioned him to react badly, instinctively, when things were dropped on the floor. "I probably can't see the real words in the books anyway, since I'm not seeing you as you really are."

Harry held his breath with hope. This was the first time Draco had spoken of doubting his own perceptions as a serious thing.

Draco turned around then and braced his hands on the table behind him, as if he thought that he would have to resist the charge of a beast like the one Harry appeared to him as. "Why haven't you scolded me?" he asked, in a low voice. "If I saw other people as animals, then I may have killed them, the way I tried to kill you when we first met. Why haven't you got angry at me about that and yelled?"

"I don't know that that happened," Harry said, as calmly as he could when his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest in excitement. "Until I have proof that it did, there's nothing to accuse you about. Besides, you weren't yourself when you slaughtered them, if that's what you did."

Draco turned his head with a pride and grace that made Harry's breath catch in his throat. No, he knew that Draco wasn't fully recovered in mind or soul or even body, but no one else would know it, from the way he looked at that moment: cool and disdainful. Harry swallowed. His mouth was much too full of saliva, but he would have to think about why later, because Draco was speaking again. "So you'll patronize me? Think of me as a poor victim, mentally ill and not responsible for my own actions?"

"Not a victim," said Harry, knowing that he had to pick his words carefully or risk wounding Draco's pride. _And he needs his pride so much right now, to help him recover. _"But yes, not responsible for your actions, in the same way that someone under the Imperius Curse wouldn't be."

Draco was silent for a moment, picking moodily at his fingernails now. Harry resisted the impulse to reach out and stop him. He knew that Draco wouldn't do this in a normal mood, and he wanted to spare his hands, but he also knew that Draco probably wouldn't take it well if giant claws snatched at him.

"That still sounds patronizing," Draco said at last.

Harry blew his breath out hard and leaned on the larger table himself. "Sorry," he said. "I've been trying to speak as carefully as I can. You've suffered enough that I don't want to hurt you more."

"You're pitying me," Draco said, and again there came that magnificent turn of his head, which reminded Harry of his stag Patronus when it was facing Dementors. Harry actually stared in fascination before he blinked and managed to take his eyes away.

_Sweet Merlin, what's wrong with me? I never reacted this strongly to him before he went to France. Is it just the shock of seeing him again, after all these years? Is he really that changed?_

"I feel sorry for you," Harry said. "You needn't have suffered under this curse at all, if only because it shouldn't have been cast on you. Or I wish you could have discovered what you needed to know about the wild talent before it manifested, if that's what it is. So, yes, I'm sorry for you. Damn sorry. But it's not pity."

Draco stood for a moment, staring at the floor. He'd stopped the picking at his nails, but his fingers flexed open and closed and dug into the flesh of his palms, which Harry wasn't sure was an improvement.

"You're being careful with me," Draco said suddenly, and in such a weird tone that Harry couldn't tell whether he was accusing Harry or not. "You're handling me as if I were made of spun glass."

"Don't you deserve that?" Harry asked impulsively. "With the creatures after you and the spell hauling you from place to place for months, don't you _deserve _to have someone take care of you as gently as I'm trying to?"

"I'm suspicious about your motive, of course," said Draco, with a blandness that was new, and which Harry wondered if he had learned in France to cover his emotions. Most of the time, when he'd known him, Draco had been passionately invested in everything, defending himself or attacking on the simplest things, and hadn't been able to manage neutrality to save his life. "If you want to take care of me because it's something you would have done anyway, or because I'm just so weak and pitiful right now."

"Would you stop talking about pity?" Harry hit the table with his palm. "I don't pity you right now, I _sympathize _with you because I can imagine how awful it would be to be dragged from place to place like that, but if you go on talking then I might take your advice and pity you after all."

"You stole Harry's temper, too," Draco said, without smiling, and then left the room.

Harry blew in irritation, rolled his eyes, shook his head until his fringe fell in his eyes the way it usually did, and then turned to finish the rest of his breakfast. Draco hadn't changed in one thing, at least. He was just as exasperating as ever.

*

"Found anything?"

Harry started. He'd been deeply immersed in a book of Dark Arts that seemed promising; it was about causing mental disorientation and confusion to your enemies, and even though Harry knew well enough that the thing Draco carried around with him was something other people could feel, it was possible that someone had worked out a physical version of the mental curse. He looked up now and put a finger in his book.

Draco leaned against the doorway of the library and looked at him with a mild expression that was probably intended to be apologetic. But Harry narrowed his eyes. He _knew _that look. Draco was about to change the entire tenor of the conversation. He'd looked like that right before he told Hermione that he was researching people who had swallowed whales, rather than the other way around, and if it was true that pregnancy felt like that.

"Yes?" he asked, shifting the book so that, if Draco _really _surprised him, it wouldn't drop out of his lap and onto the floor. It felt like its binding was too weak to survive that, and Harry didn't really want fragile paper marked with Dark curses and probably enchanted with protective spells, too, flying everywhere.

"I remembered what my ancestor said to me."

Harry choked, then decided that, when Draco flinched, he might not be able to hear the sound as anything but a growl, and certainly wouldn't know that it was meant for a noise of surprise. "Well?" he demanded, leaning forwards. "What did she say?"

"She said," Draco said, and his voice dropped as if he were intoning a prophecy, "'may you bear what I have borne, but in greater power as befits your nature, and changing to suit your needs.'"

Harry smiled and set the book down. "It's a wild talent, then. And you're sure that she was a Black? And that she was your great-great-grandmother?"

"I'm not sure how many generations back anymore," Draco said quietly. "As certain parts of the memory come clearer, others fade, as if there was some balance they needed to keep up." He traced a hand up and down the grooves in the wall next to him, which were so delicate Harry wondered what they were there for. They weren't especially attractive decorations. "But she was a Black, yes."

"Great," Harry said, and stood up to put the book he was holding back on the shelf. At a wave of his wand, most of the books in the pile he'd had waiting flew up to join them. "Then we should look into the history of the Blacks, and at all the females, and the wild talents they've carried."

"I don't understand it," Draco whispered, half to himself. "My mother made sure that I knew all about the dangerous magic that could have come from her family, because she wanted to make sure I knew _all_ about her family. I think she thought the Blacks were more important than the Malfoys." Harry concealed a smile, then remembered it wouldn't matter anyway. "But I've never heard of anything like this."

"Maybe she didn't know about it," Harry said cheerfully. "Maybe it's the kind of thing that they put in books but didn't tell a daughter."

"I don't really think it'll be in books if it wasn't in my mother's memory." Draco folded his arms obstinately. "The Blacks were the kind of people to tell things to their descendants instead of write them down."

"Really?" Harry arched an eyebrow as he turned to the section of the library he had already seen stocked with family history. "All the time? Even when they thought their descendants might use the secrets against them?"

Draco looked suddenly thoughtful. Harry nodded. "Exactly. And, if everything goes well, then I can ask Shacklebolt to send us books from the Black library itself, which I have access to as the owner of Grimmauld Place. Maybe they'd store their secrets in their ancestral home."

"I'd like to go there," Draco whispered. "When this burden is lifted, I mean, and I can see properly again. I never spent enough time there when I knew you—before. I was trying to deny being a Black, then."

"You were?" Harry paused with his hand on a shelf of books and stared at him. He had never known Draco believed anything of the kind, or that he had spent little time in Grimmauld Place because of it.

"Yes." Draco added, slowly, as if Harry were dragging the words out of him simply by listening, "It's for the same reason that I eventually contacted my Black ancestors. I never felt at home in my mother's family. I didn't have all the traits that my mother said I should have, so at first I ignored the family's existence and its part in my blood altogether. If they wouldn't appear in me, then I wouldn't acknowledge them."

"And that's why you moved to France, isn't it?" Harry spoke as he felt his mind twist and catapult him into Draco's thoughts. It worked that way so often with Dark wizards, but he'd never seen so brightly into any of his friends before, and he thought _this _was far more pleasant. "To be with your father's relatives, you said. As if you could stop being Black by becoming more Malfoy."

Draco actually took a step away from him, his shoulders straightening and his head turning in rejection. Even that movement was graceful, Harry thought, and felt a swelling and stirring that was partially from his groin and partially from his heart. He'd never known that Draco contained this many contradictions, this many unknown qualities. He'd always been a _little _interested, in the same way that some gay men of his acquaintance wondered idly about fucking anyone who was gay, but this ran deeper than that. Maybe Draco's combination of strangeness and familiarity was just what he needed to push that academic interest into a romantic one.

"I didn't tell you that," Draco said, speaking from between gritted teeth.

"I know," Harry said, and made sure he sounded apologetic, because, no matter how fascinating _he_ found these revelations, for Draco they probably sounded terrifying, as if Harry was using Legilimency on him. "It's a thing I do now. I can get into the heads of Dark wizards. That's how I track them."

"I'm not a Dark wizard." This time, Draco was speaking as though he'd like to walk across the room and punch Harry in the jaw, as if they were back at Hogwarts.

"I know," Harry said hastily. _Bollocks. Now he'll think I'm patronizing him again. _"But it works the same way. I mean, when I think about someone for long enough and wonder why they're doing what they're doing, it's like I jump into their heads."

"Well, stop doing it," Draco whispered. "After so long, I think the inside of my _head _should be mine, at least."

And he turned and marched away before Harry could stop him, or apologize. Harry sighed, and thought about going after him, but Draco probably wanted privacy now. He turned back to the family history books.

*

Draco flung himself on his bed and stared at the wall. Then he decided that didn't express his feelings sufficiently well, and folded his arms and muttered whilst staring at the wall.

He couldn't see Harry—and by now he was almost certain it was Harry—thanks to the mask of wind that covered him, the teeth and the claws, but he could hear him just fine. And that voice spoke conclusions Draco was coming to hate and distrust.

_How can I do anything but distrust someone who's trying to understand me, after the months and months of creatures chasing me? Even if they were real people, they never spoke to me the way he did. They only snarled and growled. And then he sweeps in and acts as if he knows everything and as if he wants to help me with everything, and he sounds patronizing whether or not he wants to._

_Maybe, if he's going to sound patronizing whether or not he wants to, I shouldn't blame him._

Draco huffed, rolled over, and stared at the ceiling. Well, he didn't _want _to stop blaming Harry right now, so there.

But since the war, he'd never been that good at lying to himself. He'd known when he began to feel uneasy because he didn't have any traits of the Black family. He'd known what he was really running from, or to, when he moved to France. He'd known what it meant when he began to stare at Harry too long, and that part of the reason he'd gone away was to try and know himself better, to make peace with himself, so that he could be worthy of Harry, who always seemed so whole and undivided.

And he knew, now, that he resented the way Harry made him hope, more than anything else. What if he got up his hopes and then they were dashed again? That would hurt far more than finding out that the creature with Harry's voice wasn't really Harry, which a day ago had been the most horrible thing Draco could imagine.

_If he trusts me, if he's trying to take care of me, if he came seeking me and he won't leave me until he figures this out…_

_If he can cure me…_

_But I don't know that he can. And I don't just want to sit around and be rescued, anyway, even if I have to._

Draco scowled and kicked the blankets. _I wish there was some way I could prove that I'm competent, too._

And then the world around him melted and changed, and the bed tilted backwards and went sliding into an abyss.

As he hurtled past flecks of stone and stars, Draco's one comfort was that his hopes hadn't had very _long _to linger before they were dashed.


	6. Wildest Imaginings

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part VI. Wildest Imaginings.**

__Harry was so interested in the facts he was discovering about the Black family that he was not sure he would have noticed if Draco had come down and leaned against the doorway and made despairing remarks again. But he noticed when the book vanished from his hands and the house turned dark around him and he started falling.

At once Harry gripped his wand, to make sure that it would fall with him and he wouldn't be left searching through space for it, and bent his knees, to try and absorb some of the force of the landing. Of course, when the fall had lasted what seemed like seven minutes, he began to wonder if that would make any difference. Surely a tumble this long would kill him, whether or not he was braced.

_If it's the usual type of fall. _Given the lack of rushing air around him and the fact that his body never wavered to one side or another, Harry didn't think it was.

Then he crunched down on something gritty, which sounded like sand, and rose to his feet. He had bumped down as if he had missed a step or so; the worst part was the unexpectedness of it.

_Well, and the fact that I don't know if Draco is around at all, or if he managed to teleport only me._

Harry looked around, but no light appeared. He glanced above, but there was no sun, no moon, no stars there. He frowned and pushed his glasses up his nose, then whispered, "_Lumos_."

The flare of light revealed little. Beneath his feet there was, yes, black sand. In front of him appeared only darkness and more darkness. Harry tried extending a hand to either side and behind him, and the best that he could say was that he didn't bump into anything. He frowned, baffled. At least the other places Draco had transported them were natural habitats. What was this one?

With little choice, he started walking.

*

Draco lifted his head cautiously and stared around. He was standing in a strangely lighted grove of trees. The trees were absolutely straight and had gray trunks, their limbs starting just above his head, so he could reach up and grasp them with an easy stretch of his arm. Draco did so, tentatively. Their bark was cool and dry as stone, or the black sand beneath his feet.

A moment later, he realized what was strange about the light. It shone down straight into the grove, and without flickering or changing, the way that a Muggle light bulb would look, but not a fire or a torch or a _Lumos _charm. And Draco blinked as a strange surge of familiarity came to him. He had been in this place before.

And yet, he was sure that he had not been in it. It was very confusing.

Still, it made as much sense as anything else had since the curse started. At least he was sure that he had not visited this place on the wild run from the creatures, and therefore there was an excellent chance that none of them were here.

_Except Harry, _he thought suddenly, and the surge of familiarity turned into one of loneliness. _Or the creature with Harry's voice. Please let him have come with me. I can't—I don't want to be without him, now._ Even the idea that Harry might discover how unsure Draco was about anything, including his own identity, was better than the thought of being alone again.

He took a few cautious steps outside the grove of trees. The light moved with him, steady and unchanging, and revealed more black sand, and, ahead, two wooden chairs that sat in the middle of the sand with nothing else nearby, except a fountain of springing silvery water. Draco halted and stared hard at the carving along the edge of the basin, shining white scallops and reaching hands that echoed the hands of mermaids he had seen in paintings and books—the lovely kind who lived near Greece, not the ugly merfolk of Hogwarts's lake.

And then he knew where he was. He didn't know how he could have _reached _it, because this place had never existed, but he knew where he was.

It was a land he had once dreamed up for himself after a long fever when he was six. He'd had to spend two entire weeks in bed, and in desperation, he'd imagined a place that was strange and wonderful, a combination of his fever dreams and the intense desire to be somewhere other than his room.

He had used Muggle lighting because he had seen it in a Pensieve memory his father showed him and it seemed far more strange, and thus interesting, than any charm or fire he had ever seen. And chairs in the middles of dark deserts were strange, and so was a light that followed him, and so were fountains covered with dust and yet running forever instead of ruined.

Draco sat in one of the chairs and nodded. Yes, it felt like the chairs that had stood in his nursery when he was a child. He had modeled the chairs of his imaginary land after those, because he didn't know what else a good seat should feel like.

He looked around in wonder. How had it _come _here? If his mind had constructed a complicated delusion, that was one thing, but Harry had seemed to see and hear most of the same things he had when they were in the forest and the desert, minus the creatures. So at least some of the time, his surroundings could be real to other people, too.

And then his smile froze on his face as other memories returned to him. The next moment, he had leaped to his feet and started running away from the chairs, in the direction that his mind marked "north." Yes, yes, there was a road, white and straight, streaming out into the distance across the sand. Draco pounded along it, his footsteps ringing as if he ran on Muggle cement.

There were other parts of the land that he had created, too. Things pulled from the fever dreams that had danced around him. Draco had imagined that he'd walked into the land and his parents wanted to follow him, but he didn't feel like seeing them, because every time he did they had another nasty potion or another bit of bad news to feed him. So he had invented guardians of the land, and of him, that would keep his parents out.

Things that made the creatures chasing him look like kittens.

If Harry was here, and he ran into them alone, Draco knew he would die. They had been designed to be deadly to anyone but Draco, after all.

Gasping with the urgency of his quest, and dimly grateful that he had designed the air of the place to be vaguely sweet-smelling and utterly breathable to his lungs no matter how fast they labored, Draco ran on.

*

Harry lifted his head and quickened his pace. He had walked through the darkness with no change for so long that he had begun to wonder if he was dreaming. Perhaps he'd fallen asleep over one of the books of Black family history and imagined tumbling into sleep, which his mind had turned into a fall into this place.

But the book hadn't been that boring, and Harry had learned a good rule in the Aurors: when weird things began to happen around you, assume they were going to continue until you received a definite stopping point. Preferably the point where you managed to lock the Dark wizard up in his or her cell.

And now, finally, his patience had paid off, and something had appeared ahead. It looked like a wall, or perhaps the corner of an enormous stone block. Harry didn't care if it was the local equivalent of Azkaban. A building meant people…somewhere.

Perhaps somewhere far away, he had to admit, as he got closer, his steps making a regular crunching noise on the sand, and still no one came around the corner or called out. And now he could see that the wall resembled the corner of an enormous stone block much more than it resembled the wall of a building. He slowed and studied it, and could make out no decorations, no place to scramble over the wall, no door. He halted and tapped his wand against his leg, making the light from the _Lumos _charm bounce oddly.

_You have to make a concerted effort to be as boring as this, _he thought, and decided on a slow navigation around the building, first right and then left. He'd return to the corner after five minutes of walking each time. With his luck, it _was _the local equivalent of Azkaban, and they assumed everyone walking around outside was an escaped prisoner.

Counting heartbeats under his breath, he struck to the right, what might be the northeast, around the corner. He hadn't reached one hundred twenty when he saw the end of the wall, and began to hurry towards it, smiling to himself. He shouldn't have panicked before thinking things out. Of course walls had to have an end sometime. He had fallen into an unnatural place, but it still had air and gravity, and that meant a limit to its strangeness.

And then the nightmare came around the wall, and he had to change his mind.

It was a whirling mess of forms, sliding into and out of each other: grasping spider legs, rattling human skulls, fringed antennae that looked as if they belonged to monstrous beetles, furred and feathered wings that flapped out of tune with one another, lurching elephant legs. And in the center of it all was a single, gaping, toothed mouth that screamed and screamed.

At the first scream, Harry could _feel _some of his thoughts die. Suddenly there were holes in his memory, and it was as if he were tumbling through space again, the way he had when he first appeared here, but inside his skull. He stumbled to his knees, his hands over his ears. It didn't matter, as he found when the creature screeched again; it tore more holes in his brain. He began to cry in pain and terror. Blood slicked his fingers, creeping from his eardrums. He knew there was something he was supposed to be doing at the moment, but he couldn't remember what it was.

A different voice yelled something. Harry cringed. With his luck, it would be another one of the creatures.

_Much worse than Azkaban, _he thought, but he couldn't remember what Azkaban was, and as the creature screamed again, it seemed unlikely he would have to.

*

Draco heard the scream and shouted at the creature. It turned one sliding collection of heads towards him and called back, mouths dropping open. Harry, caught in the sand before it, writhed.

Draco swore under his breath. He had designed the creatures—imagined them—so that if his mother and father heard them, they would forget all about medicinal potions and run away as fast as they could. Which was fine, but he hadn't thought about them destroying his best friend's brain at the time. He himself suffered no damage from the cries.

_God knows what they're doing to Harry_, he thought. _Maybe he's already forgotten me. _He sped up further, grateful that at least the creature was watching him now and not moving forwards to eat Harry. And it had only screamed three times that he heard. Maybe that was enough to leave some tattered shreds of Harry's brain that could recover.

He came to a stop behind Harry and put his hands on Harry's shoulders. "He's with me," he said to the creature. _Screamers, _he'd called them, needing no other name for them, like the child he was. The words sounded stupid, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. The scream couldn't harm him, but it had still rattled him. He'd imagined that the sound would be worse than anything he'd ever heard, but there was a difference between deciding that and hearing it.

The creature stared at him, the nearest skull hanging on a wire and shaking slowly back and forth. For the first time, Draco felt his gut tighten in fear for himself as well as Harry. What if it didn't accept his authority? Yes, so far this place had resembled the one he had dreamed up, but the curse would probably choose now to introduce a new exception.

However, the creature lowered the skull and scooped up sand in its empty jaws, then dribbled it out in a steady stream. Then it turned and flowed, stepped, danced, and lumbered back behind the stone wall. Draco closed his eyes in relief. He'd imagined the creatures capable of understanding, even though they only made screams and couldn't talk, and that gesture of scooping sand was one they used to show agreement.

Shaking his head over what a bloodthirsty child he'd been, Draco crouched next to Harry and ran a tender hand over his face. Harry, shivering and sweating, opened his eyes suddenly. Draco tensed when he saw the pain in them and touched Harry's ears. Yes, there was blood coming from them, but the real damage would be to his mind, he knew.

"Harry?" he whispered. "I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Can you remember me?" He hesitated, then added, "Do you remember what you were studying before I snatched you away?" He _thought _he remembered that the creature's screams would destroy more recent memories first.

*

Harry leaned against Draco and closed his eyes for a moment. God, his head hurt so much, and tattered fragments of memories were whirling past him. For a few minutes, he'd been unable to remember who Ron and Hermione were, and though he knew Hogwarts's name, he couldn't place it.

But those wounds were already healing themselves, he thought. At least, Draco's words made sense to him, and after some moments of concentration that made his head pound, he could see the words on the page of Black family history.

"Yes, I think so," he whispered. His throat was dry.

Draco immediately stroked his hair and smiled at him. Harry damned himself for noticing when Draco was still so hurt and needed help, but it felt bloody fantastic. "That's a good sign," Draco said. Harry didn't think there was a reason for him to keep his voice that soft, but he did anyway, and Harry's ears were grateful for it. "What were you studying?"

"Something about—Black talents changing," Harry said, struggling to recall the words. He had been excited about them, confident they pertained to Draco's problem in some way, but he was no longer perfectly sure how. "About how the Black family talent _is _change, and that manifests through various members of the family in various ways."

Draco blinked and shook his head slowly. Harry thought he was thinking hard, but a moment later, he said, "That doesn't make much sense. Surely I would be able to change my perception of you as a creature if—"

And his voice dried up.

"What?" Harry asked him.

"I'm seeing you as a person," Draco said. "_Here_. I didn't even realize until now—I was so concerned that I couldn't really notice _you_." He laughed a little and ran his fingers through Harry's hair again. "But when we go back to the Manor, I'll probably see you the same as ever." His fingers clenched down.

Harry lifted his hands and curled his fingers around Draco's, shaking his head slightly. His mind had begun to stop hurting; he felt as if he had a brain and not soup inside his skull again. And now the brain was functioning, and he had put several pieces together with that rapidity he had used to figure out the Ice-Cold Butcher's plan to kill all the Muggles in Britain.

"Wait," he said. "Wait."

Draco opened his mouth, blinked, then smiled wryly. "That's right. If I wish too hard, then I might move us to another place again, right?"

"That's right," Harry said, though it wasn't the main reason. He spent a moment working out the connections and making sure the pieces fit.

And they did. They _did_. Harry chuckled with pleasure. He suspected this was as close as he would ever come to feeling the happiness that Hermione did in research.

"What?" Draco demanded.

Harry grasped Draco's hands more strongly and let the grasp draw him to his feet. "I understand now," he said. "I looked at your family history, and your great-great-grandmother first, just on the chance that your first memory was clear after all. And I couldn't understand, because the book was very clear that she was a Metamorphmagus, and even if she meant to give you that as a gift, it didn't fit with what was happening to you." He leaned forwards and stared into Draco's eyes. "But then I thought about your new memory, about what she said to you."

Draco blinked. "I don't know if that memory's clear either, Harry," he said, with so much bitterness in his voice that Harry fought back the impulse to hug him. "My mind's—not as good these days as it used to be." He smiled, or tried to, but he ended up looking away quickly.

"May you bear what I have borne, but in greater power as befits your nature, and changing to suit your needs," Harry whispered. "_Changing_, Draco. That's the key, don't you see?"

Draco stared back at him, and his face had become stubborn and hostile, the way it used to look when Harry tried to take up Ron's argument that the Chudley Cannons were really the best team in the league, just victims of a decades-long run of bad luck. "No."

"You're like a Metamorphmagus," Harry said triumphantly. "But instead of changing your appearance, you're changing the _places _around you, and the appearance of _other _people."

Draco's mouth fell open. Then he shut it with a click and shot a surreptitious look over his shoulder. Harry found himself smiling, and he didn't even care that it was probably with open adoration now. Draco was worried about someone noticing that he had acted undignified, even here. It was adorable beyond words.

"But I don't understand," Draco said. "Why did it manifest like that?"

"Greater power," Harry said. "What if she sensed that you didn't really think of yourself as a Black, and wanted to give you something that would make you feel like one? Metamorphmagery is definitely the most common talent in the Black line, so you would be more like your ancestors if you had it. But you weren't born with it, and the book did mention that its nature tends to alter when it appears so late in life. So you haven't really been moving from place to place after all. You've been changing the place around you." He gripped Draco's shoulders tightly and swung him around in his excitement.

"Then the creatures—" Draco stammered.

"You changed the appearance of them, too," Harry said. "For whatever reason, you imagined that these places _should _be that way: wild and dangerous and full of enemies. But whilst you could bring others into the place, you couldn't control their perceptions like your own. They didn't think that the wild places should be full of enemies, so they didn't see the creatures. But the other dangers were real." He sobered as he thought about the way that the other Aurors and the people in various parts of Britain must have died. Some would have perished of hunger and thirst, wandering in the wilderness; others would have been stung by insects, bitten by venomous snakes, or caught by the magical creatures native to the jungles or deserts or forests that Draco imagined. Others would have walked over cliffs that only existed for a short time. And of course madness would be a common result of experiences like that. Harry was amazed that Draco was still sane, really.

_But that's because he's so strong, _Harry thought, and stifled the temptation to reach out and stroke Draco's hair.

"Why did I go _on_ imagining people that way, though?" Draco's face was troubled. Harry wondered if he was thinking along the same lines. "Why not only in one place? I can understand seeing those creatures when I returned to that first place a second time, but not—bringing them with me."

"Your talent changed in response to your wishes," Harry said simply. "And, here, your wild imaginings." He gestured at the black sand and the stone wall. "If you became convinced enough that the creatures were chasing you through one place and had the ability to travel with you, then the perceptions would have followed you. And maybe some of the time, those creatures were other people, and maybe some of the time they were imaginary."

"I understand now," Draco whispered. "When I first appeared in the forest where I met you, I was naked, but then I was in robes again. I must have decided I'd be safer in robes than running around prey to every thorn." He raked his hand through his hair. "Which doesn't tell me what I do next."

"You imagine us back in Malfoy Manor," Harry said, and rested his hands on Draco's shoulders. "But the ideal Malfoy Manor, one with all the food and house-elves and water and research books we need. And you concentrate hard on imagining me as myself, and not a creature. I want you to see me."

Draco stared at him for a moment, and then an odd smile flickered across his mouth. "_Do_ you?" he murmured.

Harry glanced off to the side and said, "Concentrate, Draco."

But still the black sand and darkness lingered around them, and Draco asked, "But did I kill those people? And what limit does this power have? It must have some kind of limit. Where _am_ I, really? What's the reality underneath all this changing and shifting?"

"We can answer that later," Harry said. "I've gone as far as I can, and my head hurts." He gave Draco his best pleading look.

Draco gripped his shoulders in return, nodded slowly, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Harry shut his eyes and leaned trustingly on Draco as the strange world around them dissolved.


	7. Harry and Draco Save the Day

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part VII. Harry and Draco Save the Day.**

Harry didn't think he needed Draco's loud sigh of relief to tell him that they had arrived safely back in Malfoy Manor, but it was nice to hear anyway. He opened his eyes and looked around, smiling and nodding approvingly at the sight of shining marble doorways, the soft-as-silk carpet under their feet, the rare tapestries on the walls.

"Well done," he started to say, but then Draco collapsed limply against him, and he had a sudden crisis to deal with.

Frantically, Harry touched Draco's throat and forehead, but his skin was only slightly warmer than normal. He didn't open his eyes when Harry called to him, but he did stir and murmur something about sleep.

"Of course," Harry said, sliding an arm around Draco's shoulders and leading him slowly down the corridor. Draco limped and stumbled, leaning against Harry all the while. Harry was filled with an odd mixture of worry and pleasure, as if part of him liked Draco's dependence on him. He put the thought out of his mind for the moment—not hard, with everything else he had to worry about—and whispered to Draco, "You must be tired, after shifting us to that place and then bringing us back here, your first controlled experiment in traveling like that."

"Hmmm," Draco muttered.

Mostly by remembering where they had first appeared in the Manor after escaping from the desert, Harry managed to find Draco's room. He opened the door and led him to the bed, which was larger and more richly appointed than he remembered. Well, Draco _had _imagined the ideal Malfoy Manor. Maybe he had given himself more ornaments and luxuries than he really had.

_If I ever manage to decide what is reality, _Harry thought, as he laid Draco gently in the middle of the bed.

"My neck hurts," Draco whispered.

Harry hurriedly arranged the pillows into a comfortable mound and propped Draco's head up, so that he wouldn't sag to the side and wake up with a painful twist there the way that Harry sometimes did. Then he pulled off his boots and tugged the sheets over him. Draco moaned slightly and extended his arm.

"What?" Harry asked, wondering if Draco had some hidden injury on his arm. When he looked, though, he saw not so much as a speck of sand on the sleeve.

"Please," Draco said, and opened his eyes. They were hazy, but with sleepiness alone, Harry thought, and not fever. "Stay with me?"

Harry swallowed and knelt on the bed, making Draco bounce slightly. "I don't know if you know what you're asking for," he said.

Draco frowned at him and pouted like a child. Harry knew that he shouldn't allow his own face to soften the way it did, because then Draco would _realize _the effect he was having on Harry. "'Course I do. Asking you to stay with me."

Harry gazed down at him for long moments, wondering if it would be so horrible to agree. Draco's lip was stuck out, his eyes wide open and fixed on Harry's face as if he could persuade him to agree just by staring. But Harry remembered the way Draco had stumbled against him, and the slight heat to his skin—and he could see the slight flush on his face if he really squinted.

_He's sick. He's out of his mind at the moment with exhaustion and fear. You don't really know that it's the best thing for him if you stay, and he may not know what he's asking for._

"Why don't you sleep, and we'll talk about it," Harry said vaguely.

Draco closed his eyes with a smile of triumph and locked his hands on Harry's arm. Harry shook his head and blinked a little. He _wanted _to lie down next to Draco and drop into oblivion—

And then he thought of what Draco would say when he woke up and found Harry in his bed, if that wasn't what he wanted after all.

_Besides, I have research to do._

So he waited until he heard Draco's breathing steady, and then he slipped out of the bed and out of the bedroom altogether, pacing up and down the corridor as he thought.

He didn't think that he could reach either Hermione or Kingsley. If the first Malfoy Manor had been just a product of Draco's imagination, then the owl might have flown out of it to any place imaginable. Or maybe the owl had been imaginary even if the Manor wasn't—Harry had found some of the truth in those Black family history books—and so his letter had miscarried.

He was on his own as far as research went.

_Well. I can do this. _Harry brushed his hair out of his eyes and chose to ignore the way his fingers shook. _I've done harder research. Remember the Rose Murderess and the way that everyone was baffled when she singled out her next victim through pied roses? Well, you solved that one, and you can solve this one. Draco should have imagined, or put, or whatever he does with objects, all the books in the libraries that you need._

He knew he would need certain spells, so he cast them then: the Awareness Charm, which would sharpen his senses and keep him awake when he was tempted to fall asleep; the Muscle Relaxer Hex, which the Auror Corps had adapted so that it just kept you loose and calm instead of relaxing you so much you fell over; and the Pepper-Up Imitation, which delivered a jolt to the system like the Pepper-Up Potion when he started to doze. It was possible the Manor had real Pepper-Up Potion, but Harry didn't know where it would be if so, and he wasn't about to wake Draco up and ask.

Then he spent a few moments leaning against the wall and catching his breath and ordering his thoughts into calm patterns. Yes, he _could _do this, but he had to be in a particular frame of mind to do so. If worries about Draco constantly intruded on him, that would be a problem.

When he opened his eyes again, he thought he had succeeded in quelling most of the emotions that could be a distraction at a time like this. With a faint smile and the hope of making another discovery like the one that he'd announced to Draco on that black sand, he went into the libraries.

He felt absurdly as if he were leaving Draco's door unguarded. He told that part of himself to shut up.

*

Draco woke free of pain and worry for the first time in what felt like months—which it might be, for all he knew. Even though he felt calmer now that he had an explanation for what was happening to him, that didn't mean he had gained all his memories back.

He started to roll over and bury his nose in warm flesh and hair. He had been promising himself that whenever he woke from nightmares. Maybe Harry wouldn't like Draco touching him just for reassurance, but lazy good morning touches were excusable for all sorts of reasons. Draco felt better trying to pretend it was a casual thing when he was halfway between sleep and waking than when he was fully asleep.

But he met cold sheets instead, and silk was a poor substitute for Harry. Draco drew himself up and glared at the spot where his best friend should have been, offended.

_How could he leave me alone like that? Doesn't he know that I would need comfort after a revelation like that? That I must be protected from the consequences of not noticing what was happening to me earlier?_

Besides, something Draco had noticed in the past was that Harry often didn't take care of himself if he hadn't spent a night in bed. He wouldn't take catnaps during the day like so many Aurors, saying that it was a "dereliction of duty." Draco had found him at his desk more than once, using spells and potions to keep awake and immerse himself in paperwork or research, and had forced him to go home. It was even _more _offensive that Harry thought he could get away with neglecting his health in Draco's home.

_It's for both our good that I'm going to confront him, _Draco thought virtuously, and set out to do it.

*

Harry sat back and stared at the ceiling of the Black library. It turned slowly in and out of his vision like an immense pinwheel, causing him to blink and stare more than once, but he didn't care. His research had paid off.

He _understood_, now.

It turned out that there were clues to the Black family members in the past who had been able to do something similar to Draco, if one just looked. The Black descendents who wrote about Metamorphmagi had a habit of underlining _where_ and _place_ and a few other words. Harry would have just thought it was an odd habit yesterday, but now he understood.

Yes, there had been people with an ability like Draco's before. And its control depended on the will and the imagination, rather than on the imagination alone, in the way that Metamorphmagery tended to. Draco would need to know what he truly desired before he could separate that from the underlying reality.

The area altered was small, the books indicated—usually about the size of the Black family home. And it moved around as the person who created it moved around. Now Harry could understand why the last photograph taken by Auror Brinsley's camera had showed Stonehenge even though he was nowhere near Stonehenge. He really had died in the field where his body was found, but he was _perceiving _Stonehenge, because that was what he was seeing at the time.

He _was seeing that._

The books had suggested something else, something profoundly strange that Harry doubted he could have thought of on his own. The perceptions of the person who created and altered the place were all-important, but they weren't necessarily shared by everyone who wandered into the place he made up. Perhaps Draco hadn't actually seen Stonehenge; instead, that was the vision Auror Brinsley's mind had constructed out of the mingling of magic and reality he was offered.

That made things more complicated, and Harry was slowly coming to accept that they might not ever know how many of the creatures chasing Draco were "real." Perhaps some of them were disguised people drawn into his reality as he roamed the countryside, who had chased him because they thought he might let them out of the trap of the forest or desert. Perhaps some of them had been exactly the way Draco imagined them. And perhaps some of them had been something else altogether, but seen differently by the people who encountered them.

_Monsters? The snake that poisoned Auror McCormick? The sea that swallowed Auror Henslow's body?_

Harry shook his head and rubbed his brow, which hurt and ached in a way it hadn't since Voldemort. He didn't really know where to go for answers if the books didn't offer them.

On the other hand, there was a ray of hope. Harry shared Draco's perceptions, except for the one of himself as a monster, and had since the beginning. And it had been perfectly obvious from Draco's behavior last night that Draco was seeing Harry as human now that they were in the Manor.

_I can perceive what he does. I can move with him—because I'm seeing almost everything as he sees it. The books did say that the ones who understand Metamorphmagi are usually their spouses and best friends. It's probably as simple as the other Aurors and the people whom Draco met as he roamed around not knowing him, whilst I did._

Harry yawned, and then chuckled at himself. It wasn't so long ago that he could stay up all night and still be ready to run several miles in the morning. He knew that, being thirty now, he couldn't count on the same strength as he'd had when he was younger, but it was always annoying to be reminded.

He lifted his wand to cast another Awareness Charm. He thought he'd learned most of what he needed to know from the books, but there was always the chance that he'd missed a stray fact. And with a talent as rare and unknown as Draco's, stray missed facts could be deadly.

"_What_ are you doing?"

Harry nearly dropped his wand as Draco barged through the door. _It seems to be my fate to be startled by Draco in libraries, _Harry thought, even as he studied his friend's face closely. He was relieved to see that the faint flush and heat of the fever appeared to have disappeared completely.

"How are you feeling?" Harry asked.

"Fine," Draco said, bristling as though Harry had insulted his parents instead of asking about his health. "I'm not the one who spent a full night in here researching."

"How do _you_ know it was a full night?" Harry considered Draco his friend, yes, but he thought it incumbent on him to point out the limits of Draco's knowledge whenever he could. That was a service friends owed each other. "I could have slept a few hours, and then—"

'I know how you get when you're protecting someone." Draco, Harry was slightly indignant to see, was eyeing him the same way he'd eyed Draco a moment ago. "You'll do everything _except _sleep, if there's something else that you can do instead. And you're probably thinking that Shacklebolt and Granger and anyone else who might help you is outside this—this spell bubble or whatever it is, so you have to do everything all on your own. That would make you even more frantic."

Harry blinked, a little startled that Draco still knew him so well after three years apart, and then shook himself. "Well, I think I found part of the answer," he said. "The magic is a blending of reality and imagination. The main reason, I think, that other people didn't see what you saw and go with you from place to place is that they didn't love and trust you. I was able to see your perceptions—most of them—and travel with you because I knew you."

Draco narrowed his eyes as though Harry had done something even more offensive than insulting his parents—insulting his hair, perhaps. Harry blinked and wondered what he had done wrong now. But then Draco demanded, "Why did I see those monsters?"

Harry relaxed. It seemed the topic had caught Draco in spite of himself, and he could forget whatever anger against Harry he might have harbored—maybe for not figuring out the cause of the curse faster. "I don't know that. But it could be as simple as your imagination having created the creatures in one place and carrying them from that to another 'world,' the way we discussed yesterday. Or perhaps something traumatic happened to you at the moment your ancestor granted you the gift that caused you to see them, and they remained in your mind and memory after that, imprinted into the places that you changed. Do you remember anything more of what your ancestor did than her words?"

"No," Draco admitted, sounding half-angry again. "And you're not going to distract me. You found solid answers. Good. Now you need to rest." He marched forwards and grasped Harry's hands, yanking him out of the chair.

"It would be good to rest," Harry said, slightly perplexed. "I did intend to go to sleep when I found the answers I wanted—"

"Which could be another week," Draco said firmly. "But instead, since I'm here, you're going to sleep for at least a few hours _now_, and then eat something, and then sleep again." He tugged Harry in the direction of the door.

"Did I do something wrong?" Harry asked, when he'd been hurried most of the way to Draco's room and Draco was still striding along, muttering words under his breath that never quite formed into the accusations Harry knew he wanted to make. "I mean, I know that I sometimes don't sleep enough, but I really _would_ have, and missing a few hours one night won't kill me."

Draco spun around and stared at him. Harry looked back, and blinked again, as it seemed he had a habit of doing this morning. There was an odd suppressed emotion in Draco's face, some strong feeling barely held back with a mighty effort. Harry wondered if something else had happened in the few hours they'd been separated. Had Draco perhaps transported himself elsewhere by mistake, and only been able to return to the Manor by concentrating hard?

"I woke up this morning," Draco said, each word like a falling anvil. "And you weren't there."

"Did you think you were alone?" Harry asked, understanding now, or thinking he did. "Did you think I'd gone? I promise, Draco, I wouldn't—"

"I knew you were _probably _in the house somewhere," Draco said, in a tone that said he wouldn't have put it past Harry to have gone to the moon in his spare time. "But you weren't in the bed with me." His grip on Harry's hands abruptly tightened to a crushing one. "And I promised myself that I could touch you when I woke in the morning, and then you _weren't there, _and it _annoyed _me."

Harry felt as though his breath was coming too fast. It was definitely too _short._ He was going to lose his balance, and he didn't know why. "But why would you care about touching me?" he whispered.

*

For a moment, Draco thought Harry would fall over, and he knew this was his chance, his way out. Harry would collapse. Draco could scold him about neglecting his health and drag him into the bedroom, arrange him on the bed, and then go out and bury himself in books or ordering the house-elves around. And when Harry woke up, he would probably be glad enough to forget about this.

But Draco didn't think he wanted that to happen. _He _knew exactly why he'd thought of Harry's being in his bed this morning as a treat.

_And why should I deny myself that? I've been denied everything in the last few months, and denied security before that, thinking I had to somehow transform myself to be worthy of just existing. _Draco didn't remember that much about his years in France, but he knew this. The haunting feeling of inadequacy was with him even now, when he thought about Harry's possibly rejecting him.

But he had lost too much in the months and years away from Britain, wandering through strange and wild places. He reached out, laid one hand on Harry's shoulder, clasped his chin with the other, and murmured, "I think you know that."

Harry lunged forwards and, unexpectedly, started kissing him. Draco froze for a moment, but closed his eyes the next. He'd wanted this, hadn't he? And if Harry was enthusiastic about it, so much the better.

And, bloody damn, the kiss was _good._

Draco had been kissed by experts in his time, but he didn't think he'd had a tongue lick over his lips like this, or dart into his mouth and out again like a hummingbird, or give individual attention to each of his teeth. He moaned under his breath and wrapped his arms around Harry's shoulders. Harry molded himself closer, grabbing the back of Draco's head and holding it still as he licked and sucked and bit, and then started to make his way down Draco's neck.

Draco opened his eyes. Harry's eyes were half-lidded and shining.

"I thought—" Harry whispered, and shook his head. "I wanted to lie beside you. But I thought you didn't know what you were saying when you asked me to stay and might be embarrassed or resentful when you woke up. I don't want you to resent me, Draco."

"And for how long has that been your goal in life?" Draco couldn't help teasing, though he gasped as Harry scraped sharp teeth down his throat in punishment.

"I've never wanted you to resent me since we became friends. But this—it's more recent. I missed you. I felt sorry for you when I started to realize what had happened. I admired your strength. And yes, I do think you're handsome, and I used to wonder if you were a good fuck." Harry hummed under his breath. "Now, do you have any more probing questions, or can we get back to what we were doing?"

The pause had been long enough for some of Draco's scattered thoughts to return, and he shook his head and pulled himself back from Harry. "Later," he said. "You're tired—"

"_Draco._"

Harry looked so disappointed that Draco almost gave in, but both common sense and the opportunity to make Harry cooperate and take care of himself stopped him. "Later," he repeated. "I want you awake enough that you can actually concentrate on what you're doing."

"I could do that," Harry muttered. Still, he let himself be pulled along to the bedroom. Draco knew that Harry had used a different room when they were last in the Manor, but he didn't really care. Harry was sleeping in his bed.

_I have Harry in my bed._

He reveled in the surge of triumph that spread through him when Harry sprawled on his pillows, and even more in the way that Harry extended a hand, silently demanding his presence in the same way that Draco vaguely remembered doing last night. He crawled onto the bed and curled up next to Harry, draping one arm and one leg over him. He doubted that he would sleep much, since he'd rested so thoroughly already, but this gave him more time to touch Harry and memorize his skin.

Harry sighed, yawned, and quickly fell asleep. Draco remained awake for a few hours only, stroking his hair and shoulders and watching his face when Draco's fingers scraped some particularly sensitive spot of skin, before he began to drift off himself.

His last thought was that Harry hadn't pressed Draco to know when he'd begun to think of Harry as more than a friend.

_Of course not, _Draco thought, feeling oddly smug. _He knows that I won't make a confession that quickly, that honestly, the Gryffindorish way he made it._

_He knows me. He _sees _me._


	8. No More Delays

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part VIII. No More Delays.**

Harry opened his eyes slowly, and lay there in warm contentment for so long that he began to wonder what had happened. Normally, he never woke like this. His own bed seemed to have problems that caused him to toss and turn and constantly wake up with pains in his neck or side no matter how he enchanted it. He had even bought a new bed, only to have the same thing happen. Hermione teased him about just not knowing how to sleep after so many years of waking up to rush straight into danger any moment.

Besides, he didn't have someone to share the bed. He'd had a few one-night stands since Draco left, but no one who could make the experience of sleeping any more comfortable for him.

And now there was _definitely _someone in the bed with him.

Harry turned his head slightly, his hair tickling what felt like a nose and making someone sneeze. The person moaned sleepily, smacked his lips, and flung an errant arm and leg over Harry's side, mumbling all the way. Harry thought he could make out the existence of several words idly threatening him with the loss of his limbs if he didn't stop making noise, which was pretty rich considering that _he _was the one who sounded like a hungry dragon hatchling.

And then memory came back, and Harry closed his eyes with a deep exhalation and a feeling of happiness that swirled in the middle of his chest like hot chocolate.

"Draco," he murmured, reaching back until his hand tangled in soft blond hair and stroking back and sideways. He knew that would wake Draco up; he reacted to the mussing of his hair like a cat whose fur was rubbed the wrong way. "I want to talk to you."

A powerful hand caught his wrist, and Draco hissed into his ear, "You're just lucky that I slept so well I'm in a good mood and willing to hear what you want to say before I kill you."

Harry smiled lazily. If there was one thing he was confident in, it was his power to bring pleasure to a partner. He hadn't had as many lovers as someone like Draco probably had, but he could _concentrate _on those few and coax them into ecstasies that they hadn't experienced before they shared his bed.

And now it was Draco's turn to feel that.

He rolled over.

*

Draco didn't like stirring from his comfortable sleep. It felt better than he had ever imagined sleep could. Certainly, as his broken memories from his years in France returned to him, he knew that he had spent far too many nights staring at the ceiling whilst thoughts about heritage and identity ran riot through his head.

Now he knew that he wouldn't ever have come to peace with those thoughts, at least not without outside interference—which had been one of the things that allowed the curse to manifest in the first place. His Black ancestor had probably realized how insecure he was and tried to give him a gift that she hoped would place him in more accord with his mother's family.

_Not that it worked the way she intended._

But Harry was whispering his name and didn't seem to understand his need for peace and quiet, so Draco determined that he'd have to show him. Especially when Harry started messing up his hair. Didn't he understand that Draco would look undignified enough in the morning, given how charms to keep his hair straight and unmussed tended to come undone during the night? There was no need to make it look _worse._

He caught Harry's hand and whispered, "You're just lucky that I slept so well I'm in a good mood and willing to hear what you want to say before I kill you."

Harry lay still for a good minute, and Draco was impressed with himself. The threat was effective, then, and he would lie down meekly and go back to sleep, so that they could enjoy—

Then Harry rolled over, freeing himself from Draco's hold with a twist that they probably taught him in Auror training, and began to kiss Draco.

_No, be accurate, _Draco chided himself, the way his mother or father would have. Harry pinned Draco to the bed with his lips. His mouth was open from the beginning—apparently, he considered close-lipped kisses gauche—and his hands sliding down and dipping under the shirt Draco had worn to bed as if they'd been lovers half a dozen times. His fingers flattened and fluttered on the bare skin, and then rose to make circles around Draco's nipples. Just one circle, and his nipples hardened. Draco knew that he'd flushed, and a fairly fiery blush at that. What would Harry think of him, so responsive to someone he'd only kissed the day before, someone he'd never shared a bed with?

_He and I have never been lovers. There are bound to be misconceptions._

But when he finally opened his eyes and looked, Harry was giving him a lazy smile, the visual equivalent of a drawl, that made Draco's protests dry up. Harry leaned in again and nipped at his mouth, first the left side and then the right, to make sure they got equal attention. His fingers continued moving around Draco's nipples, then closed in when Draco had almost got used to that and pinched. Draco squeaked, arching his back. He flushed some more. That was a reaction to being touched there that he'd never managed to get rid of, no matter how he tried.

"I think," Harry said, his lips so close to Draco's mouth that Draco was surprised he could hear the words, "that we're both overdressed. Let's remedy that, hmmm?" And his tongue ran across Draco's again in a teasing, playful lick that would have made Draco painfully hard if he wasn't there already.

Draco squealed something wordless that Harry must have taken for acceptance, because the next moment he was enthusiastically pulling off Draco's shirt. His hands immediately returned to Draco's nipples. Draco writhed and panted and finally pulled Harry's hands away from him. "_Stop _that," he whispered harshly, "or I'll come before we're undressed."

The smile Harry gave him a moment later was enough to make all the playing with his nipples seem insignificant. "Really?" Harry whispered back, his breath too warm on Draco's skin. Draco wished he could do something other than writhe, but it seemed to be a lost cause. "We'll have to do something about that." He licked his lips, and his eyelids drooped over his eyes, changing his expression in a way Draco had never imagined they could. Of course, he'd mostly thought about Harry in a sexual capacity before he'd left Britain and not after. "But some other time," Harry added, making Draco sigh a little in relief. "I want to enjoy you _fully _this time. Trousers off."

Draco sat up to drag them off, his heart beating frantically. With arousal and anticipation, of course, he thought, looking at Harry, who sat back on his heels and stared at Draco avidly as he started unbuttoning his own shirt, but with something more than that. Relief at being wanted, maybe, by someone he'd so strongly wanted for himself.

He'd had other lovers. But each time, Draco had thought he desired them more than they desired him. He had no fears that Harry would fail to make an equal return.

_The advantage of having a lover who is more Gryffindor than Slytherin, _he thought as he shrugged off his shirt, and tried to ignore both the urge to laugh giddily and the thought that such school distinctions didn't matter anymore, with them as old as they were. Harry watching him made him feel _young_.

*

Harry had to swallow several times as Draco undressed. God, he was going to drool if he didn't watch out, and how would Draco take that, when he was probably sophisticated in ways that Harry could only imagine?

But Harry still looked forwards to finding out what those sophistications were, so that he could appreciate them properly and blend them into his ideas of Draco's pleasure.

Draco's body was far from perfect. The scars Harry had given him from his _Sectumsempra _were still there. So was a series of parallel slashes across his right shoulder that had healed into an odd silvery color and which made Harry wonder if a magical creature had scratched him. He was thinner than Harry remembered. _Of course, it's probably hard to get enough to eat when you're running away from creatures of your imagination. _And he was dirty still from their adventures in the country of black sand.

But that didn't matter. What did was that Harry was finally seeing his idea of the unknown become _known_. He had wanted to know what Draco looked like. And now he did, and seeing it made him swallow again with wonder.

Draco was naked when Harry had only shrugged his shirt off. Well, that made sense, Harry thought, soothing his own impatience. He'd had a head start with his shirt already off. And then Harry gave in, because at the moment he simply couldn't give enough attention to undoing his trousers, and reached out to caress Draco's cock.

Draco gaped and then fell backwards with a silly kind of tumble, as if he was really surprised that Harry would want to touch him that way. He cocked his head over his shoulder and looked up with slow blinks, then propped himself on one elbow, so he could watch, along with Harry, as Harry's hand slowly and insistently stroked him.

Harry hummed softly. Draco's skin was hot as fever under his fingertips, and the slightest squeeze or poke made him arch the way he had when Harry touched his nipples. "I see this part of your body is sensitive, too," he whispered.

Draco gave him a distinctly unimpressed look. "Of course, you _idiot_," he said. "What you're doing—ah—_ah_." And then he fell silent and lost himself in mindless trembling for a moment, because Harry had increased his strokes as punishment.

Harry levered himself carefully forwards, pushing until Draco lay on his back and Harry rested on top of him, chest to chest. More shifting around let him find a comfortable angle where he could go on stroking Draco despite their position, and he applied several soft kisses to his cheeks and chin and lips as he touched him.

Draco was making soft little puffing noises now. Sometimes, his eyes crossed. He reached up and grasped Harry's hair, as if he meant to direct his head to give him firmer kisses, but his pleasure made his hands weak. Harry chuckled and went on delicately torturing him, noticing what touches made Draco gasp and which he squirmed away from, and increasing the first category.

"Harry." Draco whispered at last, and Harry thought he'd been struggling to say the words for at least two minutes. "I'm going to come."

"Oh, we can't have _that_," Harry said solicitously, pulling back despite the fact that that was torture for_ him_ and removing his hand from Draco's cock. Draco let out a disappointed whine that continued only until Harry reared back and began to pull off the last of his own clothes.

Draco lifted one hand to shield his face, as if he thought he would be blinded by such beauty. Harry rolled his eyes at him and smiled.

"Tease," Draco said.

"Oh, never," Harry said, and let his voice get lower the way it'd been trying to for some time. He was amused to see Draco arch again just from his words. "A tease promises what he won't deliver—or what he can't, to use the term I think is the more accurate one. I'm going to give you _everything_ you can handle, Draco."

*

Draco shivered at the look on Harry's face, but without a hand on his cock or fingers playing over his nipples, he felt more than competent to respond verbally. "_Really_?" he asked, arching a brow. "And how would you know anything about what I can handle?"

"I know you," Harry said easily, and dragged his trousers and pants down together in one fluid motion, just as Draco had done. Draco scowled. _They really do teach him everything in Auror training. _"I know the way you squirm and gasp, now. I know that you pretend to be harder than fuck, but you're soft underneath. Well," he amended, as his eyes came to rest on Draco's erection again, "_some _places you're harder than fuck."

"Soft," Draco snarled, and then pounced on Harry and dragged him back into a kiss. Harry writhed, his feet still caught in the puddles of his trousers. Draco pressed him down and held him there, determined to keep him still until he apologized for implying that Draco was weak like some sort of _girl._

Harry slid a leg neatly between Draco's and rubbed his thigh against Draco's cock. Draco dropped his head forwards, thoughts growing vague and hazy. He was almost humping Harry's leg by the time Harry pulled it away and pinned _him_ to the bed in turn.

"I know you," Harry went on whispering, as if their previous conversation had never been interrupted. "I know that you need something more than just desire. And that's what I'm prepared to give you, Draco. We were friends. We're going to be lovers now." His eyes were brilliant as he reached over and picked up his wand. A flick, and a puddle of lubricant covered his wand hand. Draco tried not to think about how many times he must have used that spell, if he could do it nonverbally. _He could have used it for wanking as well as having other lovers, _he argued with himself. "God, I want you so much."

Draco had been going to respond sarcastically, but Harry's last words disarmed him. He could only lie there gasping as Harry wriggled his fingers, moving the lubricant around evenly, and then slid his hand down to Draco's entrance. His eyes were hooded again, full of distant fire.

It had been a long time since someone had penetrated Draco, but he spread his legs willingly and lifted his arse when Harry's finger circled and dived in. He'd used more than enough lubricant, to the point where it squelched and Draco laughed. Harry smiled faintly, but he never took his eyes off Draco's, and his finger never stopped moving. Draco wondered idly if he'd be the kind who wanted Draco's legs over his shoulders, or if he'd prefer it with Draco on his hands and knees. They'd discussed sex and men during their conversations before Draco had moved, but Harry had been so shy about discussing his preferences that Draco had almost begun to believe he was reserved in bed, too.

Not reserved, Draco figured out as Harry's second finger nudged in beside the first, both of them pumping so regularly and strongly that Draco could have mistaken them for Harry's cock if they were thicker. Just _private. _There was nothing shy about the way he watched Draco's face, greedy for every hint of expression, but there was also a kind of intensity that Draco couldn't imagine experiencing outside the bedroom. It would set nearby people on fire and make Harry even more pursued than he already was.

Draco abruptly swallowed. He had just remembered that he knew nothing of Harry's life in the years since they stopped exchanging letters. What if Harry had a regular lover, or someone he'd broken up with but would go back to after he'd rescued Draco? He had every intention of keeping Harry, but it might not be possible.

Harry leaned down then and began to kiss him with such force that Draco had to stop worrying and devote a lot of time just to breathing. Then Harry pulled back and shook his head. His fingers never stopped their steady pumping.

"Don't doubt me," Harry whispered. "I can't tell you how long this feels like it's been coming, now. I won't desert you. I don't want anyone else. No one else could compare to you, Draco."

Things lovers had said to him before, and yet Draco had never taken them so seriously. And it was impossible to believe Harry was joking, with the way his eyes widened and his pupils dilated and his mouth opened, baring his teeth. Really, he looked like a predator hunting down prey.

Draco found such attention absolutely irresistible. Not enough people in his life had looked at him like that. When Harry pulled his fingers—three, now—out and then slung Draco's legs over his shoulders as he knelt between his legs, Draco didn't even feel a trace of surprise. He let his head tilt back as he accepted Harry's cock, though.

And before thought dissolved into a whirling spray of colors not unlike a Portkey's transport, he discovered that there was _no_ way he could mistake Harry's cock for his fingers.

*

Harry groaned and halted, panting. It wasn't the position, although his legs were bent a little awkwardly and the weight of Draco's thighs on his shoulders made strained muscles he didn't realize he had ache.

The heat between Draco's legs was so wonderful, so overwhelming, that Harry thought he could come before he got his erection more than halfway in. And he'd just remembered, again, that this was _Draco _he was fucking.

As he'd told Draco, he knew him.

He looked down. Draco looked more than a little dazed, his eyes shut, his head tossed back, a line of sweat making its way from one eye to the corner of his jaw.

This was Draco. His friend. The person Harry had immediately known could not be a murderer, no matter what Kingsley's evidence said, because that wasn't the way Draco worked.

And he was having sex with him.

That realization made Harry's balls tighten more than the heat inside Draco had, and he had to rest for another few minutes before he began probing forwards, in quick little jabs that Draco echoed with soft cries of encouragement.

_I wonder how long I've wanted this, _he thought dazedly, as he finally settled with his balls pressing against Draco's arse. _I wonder if I thought about it even when Draco and I were just learning that I liked men. I wonder—_

And then Draco lifted his legs and clamped them down heavily on Harry's shoulders, and Harry decided that intellectual abstractions could wait.

It was wonderful, in a way that few of his lovemaking experiences had been. They made the bed jolt and creak, of course, and at one point, the first time Harry hit Draco's prostate, Draco's foot flailed and nearly poked out Harry's eyes with his toenails. Draco gasped and moaned and cried and in general stretched his mouth open like a dog trying to eat a frankfurter. His eyes rolled back in his head, and sweat dripped from Harry's hair onto his face, and their bodies clashed and slapped and squeaked together.

It was wonderful anyway.

Harry felt a relentless surge finally racing up from his groin into his belly, and suddenly realized that he hadn't been stroking Draco's erection. He hastily reached out and gripped it, rubbing two fingers along the head. They were the same fingers he'd used to probe into Draco, so they still had smears of lubricant, and Draco writhed luxuriously and then came with a rush that made Harry grin.

A few moments more, a few thrusts later, and he succumbed to his own orgasm. Pleasure twisted through him like hot wire, and left exhaustion in its wake. It took an effort for him not to just slump forwards and probably crush half Draco's ribs. Instead, he braced himself with his hands on the bed whilst Draco slowly dragged his legs off Harry's shoulders.

Both of them panted in silence for so long that Harry felt his throat drying out and began to worry about Draco's reaction. Would he mind the fact that Harry hadn't said a word whilst they fucked and had stared at him the entire time and hadn't touched him until the end? He raised his head, shook his hair out of his eyes, and stared down at him anxiously.

*

Draco had been a little uncertain, but the moment Harry's gaze met his, he felt as smug as he had before they went to sleep. No one who looked at him like _that _was planning to give him up any time soon.

_And there's the small fact that the sex is wonderful, and I don't plan to give Harry up, either, _he thought, as he reached up, snagged his fingers in Harry's hair, and dragged his head down for a kiss.

"Love," he breathed against Harry's lips, and Harry's eyes became full of low fire again, and Draco's stomach clenched in relief and satisfaction.

Never mind the creatures. Never mind the curse. Never mind the fact that Draco still didn't know how to get his ability under control.

_All he has to do is fuck me like that all the time and I won't be able to accidentally think of transporting myself anyway._


	9. Reconcilation

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part IX. Reconcilation.**

__For some reason, after a day of brilliant sex and then a night of brilliant sleep, Harry opened his eyes the next morning with the realization that he had never told Draco the full details of why he had begun this hunt for him in the first place.

He propped himself up on one elbow and stayed there for long moments, mopping at his face and hair. He always spent some time sweating when he slept so close to someone else. But now he took much longer than he needed to wiping at it, and then remained still, his eyes deliberately shut.

_I never told him about Kingsley, or the dead Aurors, or the way that I was supposed to kill him if I couldn't bring him back alive—_

Harry sighed and rolled over to look down on Draco sleeping. He dozed with his mouth open, his lips parted to the point that Harry could practically see down his throat. He shuddered a moment, his body stirring as he remembered one point yesterday when he had _felt _down Draco's throat.

But his thoughts stole the pleasure from the moment, and his cock sagged back into stillness. Harry shook his head and reached out to caress Draco's face, sliding his fingers around the other man's mouth and tracing the curves of his nostrils. Of course he had to tell him the truth; he couldn't live with himself if he tried to conceal it. And Draco would eventually grow curious and ask why Harry had tried hunting him now and not before.

_Why didn't I? _Lying next to Draco, it seemed unthinkable that he hadn't missed this, hadn't _foreseen _that he'd want Draco, somehow, and charged forwards to what he needed.

But he hadn't, and Draco had spent God knew how long wandering in that changing landscape, not understanding what was going on, with no one else to see as he saw, no one else to fight with him and try to win him free—

Harry winced. It seemed that, no matter what kinds of thoughts he had this morning, guilt would haunt him.

But he was thirty years old. He no longer believed that fucking up meant the end of the world. He would ride through this and _get_ through it. He could accept that he'd done wrong, and now he had to make it right.

_If Draco will let me, _he thought, as Draco opened his eyes, smiled at him, and sucked Harry's finger into his mouth.

*

Harry obviously was having heavier thoughts than he liked.

Draco had got to recognize the signs when they were friends in Britain. Harry would come into the pub after a case where the victim had died, and sometimes even when he had to kill the criminal, eyes on the floor and feet dragging. Then he would sit across from Draco, sigh, drink too much tea or coffee, and dig his fingers into his palm until Draco forced him to say what was wrong.

And Draco felt he had a better right now than he used to to force Harry to talk. Weren't they lovers? Weren't they going to stay together? Draco didn't have many doubts on that score now. Not with the way Harry looked at him, not with the way his hands kept straying across the table to touch Draco or reached back when Draco passed behind his chair, not with the way he'd woken him this morning.

"You won't make it better for putting it off," said Draco, blowing across the surface of his tea to cool it, and Harry tossed him a startled glance. Draco rolled his eyes. "Oh, come _on_, Harry. I know what you're like, and you brood and fret and stamp around the place like a restless horse until someone talks you out of your melancholy. I've had enough of that this morning. I want to sit back with a big silly grin on my face and stare at you like an idiot, as is traditional after brilliant sex." He crossed his eyes and produced the requisite big silly grin, which at least had the effect of making Harry laugh. "Come, now." He made his voice soft and coaxing, and leaned forwards. "I think you can tell me what's wrong."

Harry swallowed and nodded, though Draco hadn't been aware there was anything in his mouth; he'd only been picking at the eggs and toast the house-elves had seen fit to serve them this morning. "Two things," he said at last. "I never came hunting you before this. I left you to suffer." He looked at Draco's face, and he couldn't have looked guiltier if he'd murdered someone, but Draco was used to the effects of Gryffindor martyr complexes, and only snorted. Harry promptly looked upset, as if Draco's contempt was contempt for genuine pain. "No, you don't understand. I didn't know what was happening to you, so it's not like I _ignored _it, but I could at least have tried to communicate with you and find out what was happening. I should have sent more owls to France. I should have—"

"After I ignored one or two?" Draco lifted an eyebrow. "I don't remember everything that happened to me in France, Harry, but I _do_ know that I was immersing myself in research on both the Black and Malfoy families, trying desperately to ease this sense of belonging 'nowhere' that I had. I ignored owls because I thought they weren't relevant, unless they were owls from people sending me genealogical information. I had this obsession with proving to myself where I belonged, and then returning to Britain in triumph." He rolled his eyes. "Don't ask me why I thought it would be triumph. But you weren't the only one who let that relationship lapse, Harry. We were both perfectly ignorant of each other's lives for the same amount of time. And _now _we're together, and I don't see much sense in reliving the past, except for the way in which it might give me some control of my ability."

Harry's face softened as he stared at Draco, and it took Draco long moments to recognize it as a look of adoration he wore. Draco felt a shiver of pleasure as great as having sex with Harry run through him. Yes, he could—get used to being looked at like that.

_Well, it's _almost _as great as having sex with Harry, at least._

"Yes," Harry said, shaking himself, "but I should have tried harder." Draco scowled, recognizing one of the incoming explosions of Gryffindor guilt. "I should have realized that you would need help—"

"When my parents didn't realize it? When I couldn't communicate with anyone outside the bubble of land I was in?" Draco shook his head. That caused his hair to fall over his ears, and he noticed the way that Harry's eyes followed it and widened slightly. He hid a smug grin. He would have to keep his hair at least long enough to do this in the future. "No. If you keep blaming yourself, then I might start yelling at you, and we don't want that, do we?" he added, when he saw Harry open his mouth again.

Harry swallowed, then reached out and gripped Draco's hand. "Thank you," he whispered. "But there's a second thing I have to tell you, and I don't think you'll hear this with so much equanimity."

"That's one pleasant change, at least," Draco mused. "Granger has rubbed off on your vocabulary."

Harry frowned. "Draco, I _am _trying to be serious here."

Draco pushed himself back from the table, though he kept his hand in Harry's. "And have you thought that I don't want to be serious about this? Of course I'll fight to stay with you. That was never in question." Harry blinked, and Draco realized then that, though Harry might have intended sticking with him, he also could have thought that Draco was ready to abandon all this at a moment's notice. "But I'd rather be serious about trying to control this errant magic I seem to have. The threshing out of guilt and confessions about something you did because it was natural at the time and you had no idea I'd get hurt in the future can wait for later."

"All right," Harry said, and looked down at the table for a minute. Draco hoped he was trying to hide a smile. "But haven't you thought about why I suddenly came and found you now? What drove me to this in the first place, when I had no idea you were suffering?"

"I have thought about that," Draco said, "when I brooded yesterday and—the day before that? Before we went into the black desert, anyway." He'd never given that imaginary place a name, and he would have felt odd trying to come up with one now. "It has to be something to do with your Auror work. That's the only thing you'd be so reluctant to mention, and you'd have said something if it was my parents."

Harry caught his breath, and then shook his head a little. "I keep forgetting how smart you are," he said.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Draco said, "and not as your statement that I don't normally display this intelligence."

Once again, Harry stared at him with a look of adoration. "How can you _do_ this?" he asked then. "You've been hunted for so long. You were almost incoherent with terror just a few days ago. You didn't know that I was who I said I was. And now…"

"Because you're here, and I can see you as human, and I trust you to help me." Draco cocked his head to the side, puzzled. _If there's anything that Harry ought to be used to, it's the consequences of his actions helping people. He is a hero, plain and simple. _"I'm no longer hopeless."

Harry nodded this time, at least seeming to think that the statement made sense. His thumb rubbed for a moment over the back of Draco's hand. Then he drew a deep breath and said, "Yes. Three Aurors had died tracking you, and their bodies were found in strange places, or with strange wounds. Kingsley wanted me to find you and bring you in if I could, or kill you if I had no other choice."

Draco flinched and tried to withdraw—an instinctive reaction, not because he thought Harry would have agreed to kill him—but Harry held on hard to his hand. "I knew you couldn't be a murderer," he said fiercely. "I _knew _it. And I wish Kingsley had put me on the case from the beginning, because I would have been the one to find you and that could have prevented those other Aurors from dying. And I knew the moment I sensed wild magic in the meadow where the latest body was found that it wasn't as simple as a curse you were casting that got out of control."

"But I did ask for more magic than I could handle." Draco gave up on tugging his hand away and leaned towards Harry; he needed the comfort too much, especially with pain and remorse churning in his gut. "I was responsible for the deaths of those Aurors. If I hadn't asked my Black ancestors for—"

"You couldn't anticipate this," Harry said. "No one could have, given how rare the talent is. It certainly wasn't covered in Dark Arts instruction during my training. You weren't any more responsible for the deaths of those Aurors than a rainstorm or an earthquake is responsible for the people it kills, Draco."

"And if it happens again?" Draco demanded, wondering, for a moment, just when their roles had reversed and Harry had taken on the role of protector.

"If it happens _now_, after you know something about what you're doing, then you would be responsible." Harry's gaze was serene and clear. "But we're going to work together to make sure it doesn't happen again, aren't we?" He squeezed Draco's hand.

"Right." Draco shook his head and blinked a little, then said, "Not that I have the first idea how to begin controlling it."

"From what I read yesterday—" Harry paused to think about the time, which made Draco smug. It wasn't _every _lover he managed to bedazzle with sex like that. "Yeah, yesterday, there are other members of the Black family who had the talent. They must have controlled it, or the chaos they caused around them would have been noticeable and there'd be records of that _somewhere _that we must have found. So we'll look in the books first, and then it's on to performance."

"I think you'll find," Draco said, so confident for the moment that he felt as if he were playing Quidditch, "that I'm very good when it comes to _performance._"

"Oh, marvelous," Harry said. "Then I can count on the next five or six decades of our lives not to be boring."

Draco reached for his tea, triumphant, smug, and fighting the urge to drag Harry back to bed again.

He had to eat the rest of his breakfast with only one hand, because Harry didn't seem to be inclined to let the other go.


	10. Control

Thank you again for all the reviews!

**Part X. Control.**

"I don't like this."

Harry smiled a little, but kept his eyes on the book in front of him. "It says that one of your ancestors, Jupiter Black, learned to control his gift by shifting himself into a volcano, and almost dying," he said. "I don't think we want to imitate that method of instruction."

Draco half-choked, half-laughed. "Of course not!"

The laughter had been what Harry was looking for. Draco was so tense, so afraid that he would make a mistake, that he was all the more likely to end up making one. Harry remembered the phase of Auror training when he had been convinced that he couldn't do anything right, and so of course he couldn't. He didn't want that to become a self-fulfilling prophecy for Draco, too.

"Right," he said. "Then we'll work with the way that your very distant ancestor, Reglia Black, trained her gift. That seems to be where the Metamorphmagus gene and its variants came from, anyway, when she married into the family." He shut the book with a snap and moved over to stand in front of Draco, absently noting how large his pupils were. Even like this, half out of his mind with fear, Harry thought, he looked good.

"Should you have shut the book?" Draco whispered. "What if you forget something? What if you don't tell me to do something exactly right and I do something stupid and wrong instead? I don't like this. I wish you would look at the book. How do you know how to train me from looking at accounts of Metamorphmagi, anyway? I don't like this." It was the same monologue Harry had heard him muttering desperately to himself last night, when he had thought Harry was asleep.

"Draco." Harry clasped Draco's shoulders and made the other man really _look_ at him. "Do you trust me?"

Draco swallowed and nodded.

"Do you trust my research skills?" Harry looked into his eyes and waited when he hesitated. "I can let you do the research on your own, confirm what I found. We can delay a few days if you're more comfortable doing that."

"I—I trust you." Draco reached out with a faltering hand and gripped Harry's. "Just—just tell me why you can figure out how to train my gift from looking at the accounts of how Metamorphmagi were trained in the past. They're different kinds of gifts. I _know _they are."

"Because your ancestors actually did include some instructions on that," said Harry. "They just disguised it with the language they used. When I saw an entry that was supposedly about a Metamorphmagus but had words like _where _and _place _underlined, then I knew what they were talking about. They used odd metaphors, too, like the _landscape _of Metamorphmagery." He gently turned Draco around so that he was facing the far wall of the library. "I won't let anything happen to you," he whispered into Draco's ear. "I wouldn't even have suggested this if I didn't trust that book completely."

Draco smiled and leaned back towards him. Harry was aware that the smile was distinctly tremulous, but the _words _were brave. "I'm not used to having anyone to depend on. It's—frightening. At least when I was running through the world by myself, I knew at once when something was within my capacities. I knew my limits. I just don't know yours as well." He was whispering by the time he finished. From the sound of his voice, his throat was tight.

"I know," Harry whispered into his ear, keeping his voice low and soothing. He didn't want, not for one moment, for Draco to think that Harry somehow scorned him because he was afraid. The only _sensible _thing, he thought, was to be afraid. "Do you know how long it took me to learn to work together with another Auror, instead of relying on myself in every situation? _Too _long. I know that damn good and well." He stroked his hands in reassuring motions up and down Draco's shoulders. "It drove Ron mad."

Draco laughed again, and slowly, slowly the shoulders Harry was holding sank into a smooth, relaxed state.

"You have to calm down," Harry said, in the causal voice that Ron had said helped him concentrate on learning new spells. It worked better than the monotone most of their Auror instructors had used, at least. Harry wanted Draco to be focused on one thing, one process, not lulled into a trance. "The first step is controlling the size of your change, so that you don't extend your new lands into places they aren't supposed to go. Look at the wall. Consider the size of it. Just consider for right now. That's all."

Draco licked his lips, and his breathing gradually slowed.

"Tell me when you think you have the size of the wall estimated," Harry ordered.

"I think I have it." Draco's voice was a little strained, but it was calmer than it had been since they walked into the library.

"Good." Harry closed his hands down, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to remind Draco he was there, and raised his voice slightly. "Then concentrate on changing the wall into a landscape."

"What kind of landscape?" Draco asked, his voice skirling back up the scale towards panic again.

"Anything you want." Harry lowered his voice again; he thought Draco needed its influence. "That's what your gift is for. For bringing you to the places that you _imagine_, rather than real places. Metamorphmagi are limited. They become real people, most of the time. They confine themselves to _imitation_. But you can create, Draco. I do envy you."

As he had thought it might, the mention of envy did the trick. It would be a familiar emotion to Draco, at least from other people. He stood up straighter and fixed all his attention on the wall.

Harry stroked his shoulders lovingly, moved close enough that his chest touched Draco's spine and he would be transported with him if something accidentally happened, and waited.

*

_A landscape. Anything I want._

Strangely, for long moments Draco's heard only whirled with images of the places he had already visited. The deep forest might be a lovely place without the creatures hunting him; the desert could be glorious in the cool twilight…

But why should he confine himself there? Harry had said that he was envious, and that made Draco want to show him what he had to be envious of, so that then he could delight Harry by sharing it instead of keeping it for himself. He focused in, concentrated, and began to shape the wall into a landscape.

He thought about motion, darkness alternating with leaping light. And a moment later the surface of the wall began to surge and shiver, and then small rippling motions spread across it, traveling from the ceiling to the floor. Draco laughed aloud and threw more color into it. He wanted the top ripples purple, the bottom ones green—

But then the wall began to bulge and expand, and he realized that the landscape was trying to extend further than the limits he had put on it.

He nearly panicked. What would happen if that formless movement reached him and Harry? What if they plunged into an abyss and never returned? Draco hadn't thought about what was _under _the movement yet. He just knew what he wanted and had begun to create it.

"Don't panic." Harry spoke directly into his ear, his presence a shock nearly as great as the sudden change of the landscape, but his hands steady and firm on Draco's shoulders. "You can control this, but you'll lose control if you're feeling fear instead of mastery." His hands began to move up and down Draco's arms again. "Why shouldn't you master it? This magic is in the world because of you. It's supposed to obey _you_."

Draco swallowed. "But I don't know how to control it," he whispered. There was purple dripping like paint now onto the carpet of the library; the formless color lapped hungrily at the edges of the bookshelves that flanked the wall. "I can't tell it to just obey me—"

"Why not?" Harry's voice was on the edge of laughter. "Why shouldn't you tell it exactly that? How did you learn to control your magic?"

"That's what I'm trying to learn right now!" Draco yelled, taking a step back as curlicues of curious blue reached for his legs.

"No, I meant, how did you learn to control your ordinary magic, your wand magic?" Harry spoke in a calm and rational voice still, even as he and Draco both hopped backwards to avoid the spreading pool. "Did you have to consciously think about directing it through the wand core? Or did you think about what you wanted, focus on the incantation, and cast that way?"

Draco understood what Harry was saying then. It hadn't been conscious, had it? Of course not. He had concentrated, but it had been far more like using a limb. He didn't know every step of the process, but he didn't need to know.

"Back!" he yelled at the pool, exactly as he had yelled at his wand to produce sparks when he first handled it in Ollivander's shop.

And the pool shuddered and ground to a halt, as Draco envisioned it doing so. He had to think of the magic as a part of his body; well, he would do that. He _pushed _with his mind and his body, taking a step forwards. Harry moved with him again, draping himself around Draco's shoulders like a heated cloak, and the pool began to shrink to a dazzling pinpoint in the middle of the pale wall.

"You're doing so well, Draco," Harry murmured into his ear. And Draco's heart was high and his head and his blood were pounding with excitement, and he focused again and finally added the substance he had dreamed of to the swirling chaos.

The color became water. Draco was gazing at the most beautiful ocean he had ever seen, far more appealing than the cold gray sea that he had ridden more than once to Azkaban. He infused it with strength and color, tints of violet and blue that he remembered from seeing photographs of the Mediterranean and some other ocean. And then he pushed it further into dazzling beauty, taking all the shades of water from his mind that he had longed to locate in the real world and had never been able to.

A moment later, the distinct sound of water crashing against sand came to them, and the voices of gulls. Draco grinned. He could vaguely remember adding them to the picture in his head, because everyone knew that an ocean should have seabirds and sand, but he hadn't consciously imagined them.

"Well done, Draco!" Harry said, hugging him. "But—watch out!"

A wave had leaped out from the wall and was hovering over their heads, whilst the rest of its comrades were trying to overwhelm the shelves. Draco knew he had lost track of the size of the wall again.

He focused on the water, and on the presence of Harry's fingers clinging to him as if for protection—though he knew they were giving strength as much as receiving it—and drove his mind in another hard plunge forwards. The water stopped broadening and wavered from side to side like someone jogging a fishbowl back and forth. Draco took a deep breath; this took more effort than he had thought it would, and sweat blossomed on his forehead.

"Do you need to let go and relax for a little while?" Harry whispered into his ear. "Dismiss the water? Or can you take us through?" He reached down and clasped Draco's hand as if he didn't want to be left behind, no matter what the decision.

Draco took strength from those last words, too. Harry wanted them to go through, which meant Harry thought he could do this. He bowed his head as if against a strong wind and stepped forwards.

The world around them shook and shimmered like a curtain with gold beading. Draco found himself holding his breath, and then wondered why he had to. The ocean wasn't going to drown them. It was in front of them, but _he _controlled its size and forced it to lie down when the waves wanted to rise and cascade across their heads.

There was a dizzying moment of transition when both of them stepped in and then fell, the tilted view of the wall leaping and twisting in front of them…

And then they were standing on a beach of white sand, with the waves sinking back in front of them and the dazzling white birds that Draco had heard and imagined but not seen whirling around their heads. Harry was still behind him, his hands on Draco's shoulders as warm as the sand under his feet.

Draco laughed aloud.

*

Harry looked around carefully. The ocean scene in front of them was as perfect as any he'd ever seen—not that he'd seen many, since tropical oceans were in short supply in Britain and the few holidays he'd taken were usually _in_ the country. There might always be a Dark magic emergency that meant he had to rush back, and that was easier to do if he wasn't on the other side of the world.

But it became flat and thick at the corners, like a painting with the paint run and muddled. And Harry had to admit that he was concerned about _where _they were, now that Draco had created a beach for them to step onto as well as the flat vision of the water. Were they within the wall of Malfoy Manor? Was water soaking into the carpet of the library, drizzling the books?

Then he shook his head. He was thinking, again, like someone who didn't understand Draco's ability. The books had explained this to him; he just had to keep the words and magical theories in his mind, rather than lapsing into absolute trust of his senses. The Manor was a creation of Draco's imagination, as much as this scene was. If he wanted to widen the walls enough to accommodate an ocean, then he could. And if the ocean was "lapping" into the library, then the books weren't hurt; they were transformed into part of the sea, not destroyed. It was a true change Draco worked, just like the way that a Metamorphmagus or Animagus changed himself. The "true features" weren't under Sirius's fur when he was a dog; he actually had to transform back to human for anyone to see that he was Sirius Black.

And Draco could change this ocean scene back into the Manor.

_If he wants to._

Harry took a deep breath. Now that Draco had achieved such stunning success with the first part of controlling his gift- much more, Harry had to admit, than he had thought Draco would be capable of the first time he tried- what he still needed to do was find a way to return to the real world, to the consensus reality that wasn't part of his imagination. And Harry thought he knew a way to instruct him in that, but it would take even more trust than Draco had shown so far.

"Draco," he said.

Draco, who had pulled away from him to chase a gull, turned around with a faint frown on his face. He had probably decided, from the tone of Harry's voice, that this wasn't going to be simple praise for what he'd done. "Yeah?" he asked. A breeze from the sea, suddenly starting, lifted his hair away from his brow. Harry found himself smiling in spite of the seriousness of the situation, and Draco relaxed and smiled back.

"I do love you," Harry said, keeping his voice calm as he had before, when first urging Draco to change the wall. "I am proud of you. But you know that we're going to have to return to the reality that contains the Ministry and Ron and all the rest of them?"

"Weasley?" Draco wrinkled his nose and cocked his head. "Must we? A world without his presence wouldn't change much, and it would be close to perfect."

Harry smiled, but didn't laugh. "Do you think you can do that?" he asked. "You've been in worlds of your creation for so long, and I don't know how to control this magic. I'm entirely at your mercy." Draco half-frowned, as if he couldn't decide how he felt about that. "You'll have to be the one who locates a map or compass to guide us back."

Draco looked away from him and stared at the sand for long moments. "I want to do it," he whispered. "But you were the one who guided me to get here. I don't know how to get back to the real world if you don't guide me there as well."

_Oh, no you don't. _Harry felt the enthusiastic response to that suggestion from within himself. He would like nothing more than to guide Draco—

Except that he couldn't protect him all the time, and he worried that Draco would become dependent on him if he protected him too much. Draco had spent months running from enemies. Yes, he was afraid still. Yes, he needed someone who would stand by his side and never hurt him as the creatures had done; yes, he needed someone he could trust absolutely.

But for all that, he was the true expert here. Harry knew much more about Dark Arts than wild magic. And the slender clues the books had given him weren't much help. Most of the people with this gift had been born with it and had learned how to use as they learned how to use their wand magic and their muscles. Harry and Draco would be following Draco's instincts, again.

"A Metamorphmagus becomes the person they were born as by remembering what they used to be," said Harry. "The shape of their faces, the color of their eyes, the length of their hair. I think you need to remember the place you grew up in."

"I did," Draco said, and the frown deepened, and he moved away from Harry as if he actually couldn't bear to stay near him. Harry stifled the immediate defensive reaction that caused and waited. "And all I did was create somewhere I imagined. I can't remember the Manor without idealizing it."

"Then I'll help you." And Harry felt a rush of relief overcome him, because this was a legitimate way to help; it wasn't taking Draco's independence and agency away from him. He closed his eyes and put his wand to his temple. They didn't have a Pensieve with them, and he didn't want to tax Draco's abilities to create one. Nor was he any good at Legilimency. But the Aurors had developed spells that would get around those problems, especially when there was important information to be shared between partners.

"_Conmunico memoriam_," he whispered.

The world around him rippled and wavered, but that was because he had his eyes shut and not—he thought—because Draco had lost control of the magic that shaped his place. The memory of how he had seen Malfoy Manor during the war slid down his wand and hung, dripping, at the end. Harry turned his wand so that it aimed at Draco. He didn't have to open his eyes to do that. He thought he would know what direction Draco was standing in, what expression he wore, and where he was for the rest of his life.

"_Conmunico_," he repeated.

The memory shot away from him and into Draco's mind.

*

Draco swallowed when he realized what was happening, but he remained still. Of course he trusted Harry, and it was time that he showed that as profoundly as Harry had showed it when he followed Draco into world after world of his own creation.

The memory flew towards him like a scattershot of silver. Draco kept himself calm as he watched it come by reciting the details of the Memory-Sharing Spell in his mind. It was much more limited than a Pensieve, because it would only share a few scattered instants or glimpses, instead of a series of moments linked together in narrative fashion. But sometimes the scattered instants or glimpses were all that was needed—

The memory struck his face, clung there like a spluttering, shimmering film for a few moments, and then sank into him.

And he saw Malfoy Manor as Harry had seen it when he was dragged there by the Death Eaters, walls tilting crazily, dungeons locking him in when all he wanted to do was go and save Hermione from torture at the hands of Bellatrix, Draco's own face in the middle of it pale and awful, the fear of Voldemort weighing him down and crowding him and staining Draco's beloved home with a tarnish that only his love of and regard for Draco in the present would have allowed him to put aside—

Draco shivered, and shouted, and sucked the memory into his head and pieced it together with the warm rooms he remembered, the sanctuary of his bed where he lay reading about the adventures of the Calm Light Wizard when he was sick, the swaying white curtains that his mother loved to stand in and gaze between, the sight of sunshine falling through the large stained glass windows in the drawing room—

`He saw it as he might have seen a picture of Harry acting as an Auror. That was a piece of Harry that Draco had little desire to share, but he acknowledged it as real and knew that Harry's instincts for protection and power might not have been as honed as if he didn't fight Dark wizards. Harry was both that fighter and the friend and lover of one former Death Eater. And Malfoy Manor was the home of Draco's childhood and the place Harry remembered as a dungeon.

And Draco reached out, sticking the pieces together, groping, flinging the invisible, flowing shape of a house through space, draping the loop around first one and then another building, seeking, seeking, seeking.

And finding.

Harry lunged forwards, wrapping his arms around Draco, just as the world melted, and dissolved, and they tumbled.

And behind the world Draco had created, ocean and sand, was another world, one stronger, firmer, that did not rock on its foundations when he tried to move it. Within it was the building he had found, firming minute by minute, and it reeled Harry and Draco towards it like a fisherman using a line.

Draco opened his eyes.

It was broad day, and he was standing with Harry in his arms in the entrance hall of the Manor, with a dozen squeaking house-elves running towards them.


	11. Courage

Thank you again for all the reviews!

I should mention that I am going on vacation this next week, so there won't be any updates until probably next Monday. On the other hand, this is the last chapter of _Siege Mentality_, so you won't have to wait on this story.

**Part XI. Courage.**

"I think it was possible that you were in Malfoy Manor most of the time, though obviously you moved around at some point and transformed the other pieces of land where the Aurors were found. Otherwise, there's no reason that my trying to Apparate to Malfoy Manor should have found you."

Draco had to smile as he listened to Harry's chattering. Harry was flipping through a book in the Manor's real library, all the time reciting his theory about where Draco must have been traveling in terms of the real world whilst in worlds of his own creation. He wasn't completely like the Harry Draco remembered, who had treated his knowledge of the Dark Arts as if it related to his job alone and didn't like doing research about other forms of magic.

_But then, _he mused, as he stretched his arms over his head and came to stand behind Harry, _I never knew him this well before._

"I think that my imagination must have interacted with reality at some level, though," he said, and traced one finger down the spine of the book Harry held. Harry promptly stopped chattering and watched the movement of his finger with great interest, Draco noted, hiding a smirk. "I certainly couldn't have imagined books with the answers in them when I didn't know what the answers were myself. And I didn't remember the books _that _well. I hadn't been in this library in years."

Harry exhaled. "I was trying not to think about that," he said, and captured Draco's hand and squeezed.

Draco stared at him. "Why ever not? You want to know what to say to the Aurors, after all, and you know that they're going to ask you how my ability works."

"I know." Harry ran a finger along the veins in the back of Draco's hand and refused to look up. "But if you can interact with reality on some level, then they might try to say that you were _conscious _of what you were doing when you killed those Aurors. I was hoping that we could prove that you were solely in a world of your own creation, with no way of perceiving who they were."

Draco swallowed. He still hadn't come to terms with the thought that he _had _killed, yet, but he knew that he wouldn't get around it by avoiding it. "Let me worry about that," he said, and squeezed Harry's hand back. "I know that you'll explain as well as you can. I know that you won't let me go to Azkaban as a murderer."

Harry looked up at him and smiled. "No. If actual Dark wizards can be excused that on account of madness, then you'll be excused it on grounds of possessing a rare magical talent."

Draco shuddered and tried to joke as best he could. "Just don't let any Healers from St. Mungo's look at me. They _really _would be trying to figure out how to study me through the talent, and if that's the price of staying out of Azkaban, I don't want it."

Harry laughed and embraced him, so hard that Draco had to struggle to breathe for a moment. "I won't let that happen."

There was a depth of fervor in his voice that stole Draco's ability to joke about it.

"But it would help," Harry went on in a more brooding tone, "if we knew why you saw the Aurors and so many of those around you as beasts."

"I've been thinking about that," Draco said.

Harry went still in the way that had once frightened Draco as much as it impressed him, because it meant Harry was about to attack a Dark wizard, and he didn't ever want Harry to think of him that way. "Yes?" he whispered.

"My mind's capable of drawing on my imagination as well as reality," Draco said. "In fact, that's why this became a problem in the first place. Uncontrolled perceptions and desires interacting with what was actually there."

"Yes," Harry repeated, and shifted a little. Draco knew that he was getting impatient, but he had the ability to hold still and listen when he really wanted to demand answers. Draco hid a smile. He _also _knew that Harry would probably misunderstand if he was to see Draco smiling now.

"And I remember being terrified of whirlwinds when I was a child." Draco sighed. "My mother read me a book that had moving pictures of them. Enormous columns of pure wind, dark enough to see, ripping cities apart. Add claws and teeth to that picture, and it wasn't so far from what I saw when I first looked at you."

Harry nodded. "Yes. That would make sense, and when I tell Kingsley what else I discovered about your talents—"

"What else _you_ discovered?" Draco drew back and glared at him.

"Well, I had the original idea, after all." Harry blinked innocently at him. "And I was the one who noticed that the Black ancestors referred to this variation of the Metamorphmagus talent with a sort of code—"

Draco tackled him, sending him sprawling to the floor and books flying everywhere. Harry dragged himself up and retaliated, and after a moment the wrestling match turned into something far more pleasant.

*

_Bring him in, Harry._

Harry rolled his eyes. That was all Kingsley had written in answer to Harry's letter that told him what had happened in broad outline and that they were back in the real world. And, well, that was unnecessary. Did Kingsley really think that Harry would attempt to run off to Australia with Draco, even if he was guilty? He would want Draco to either have a normal life or pay for his crimes, depending on his innocence.

"Draco?" he asked, wandering down the corridor to the kitchen, Kingsley's letter still swaying from his hand. The owl that had taken his message, as well as the one that had brought Kingsley's answer, definitely wasn't imaginary. Harry swatted at the mess left on his arm by the bird's landing and grimaced in disgust. Then he remembered he was a wizard, as Draco would say, and spelled it off.

"Hmmm?" Draco looked up from a plate of toast. Harry barely managed to keep from rolling his eyes. Draco's house-elves had been so madly glad to see them that they kept trying to spoil both Harry and Draco, but they'd discovered soon enough that Harry really didn't do well with spoiling. Draco, though, had shamelessly put them to work making him plateful after plateful of buttered toast.

"Will you be ready to leave soon?" Harry took a seat across from him, and snorted when he noticed that Draco was reading the latest _Daily Prophet. _Of course he would decide that he had to know current events the moment he was back in Britain, even though he wouldn't know the events of the three years before that very well—or however long he had spent trapped in his wild talent. "I have the feeling Kingsley's getting impatient." He tossed the letter at Draco, who caught it and read through it without changing his expression.

"I'll leave when I'm done with breakfast." Draco put the letter on the table and turned back to the _Prophet _and his toast.

Harry leaned back in his chair and surveyed Draco thoughtfully. Draco still hadn't talked with him fully about what it meant that he had probably killed the Aurors who had come after him and some of the people caught up in his imagined worlds. He didn't appear to be suffering, but Harry had learned that Draco sometimes purposefully hid that suffering so that no one could accuse him of self-pity. Harry didn't know if he had come to terms with his "responsibility" for that or not.

He didn't really know what it had been like for Draco. He hadn't known that Draco had ever felt so uncomfortable in his own family that he would need to ask his ancestors for something to "prove" that he was supposed to a Black. He didn't know how long ago Draco's talent had manifested; Draco still hadn't hinted at that, and he could have spent a long time in France coping with it before he had returned to England. Maybe no one had even noticed if he'd started transforming the land in someplace sufficiently isolated.

He didn't _know_. He wasn't sure that Draco would explain it to him even if he asked.

But…

But Harry thought that he owed it to Draco to keep trying to find out, and to help him live with it if that was necessary. He was the only one who had somehow managed to share enough of Draco's perceptions to really _reach _him. He would keep trying, and he would stand between Draco and a hostile world if he had to.

If Draco wanted him to.

Sitting there, Harry felt some of his worry lift. He might not understand what everything was like with Draco, and he might not be sure that Kingsley would even attempt to understand, but he had his own determination to stand by Draco, and that was going to happen no matter _what _else happened. That was enough.

*

"He's not a murderer."

It took Draco a mighty effort to keep his hands folded in his lap instead of clawing at the arms of the chair he sat in. He'd been sitting here and listening to Harry make that statement, or variations of that statement, to Kingsley Shacklebolt for hours now.

And still Shacklebolt hemmed under his breath, and glared at Draco, and especially looked at his left arm, as if he thought that Draco's talent was somehow connected to being a Death Eater.

_No, _Draco thought, as he met the man's eyes for a moment and then looked away, _as if he thinks that once someone does one evil thing, he's always evil._

Draco couldn't afford to show his contempt for the very notion, or for the whole system of Ministry bureaucracy. He had to go through with this if he wanted a chance at a normal life. So he stared at his feet and let Harry stand up for him.

He hated it. But sometimes things he hated had to happen.

"He killed three Aurors," said Shacklebolt. His voice had finally started to crack and rise slightly, and Draco felt a small shiver of triumph that he was equally careful to keep off his face, along with his impatience in general. "You would call someone else who had done that a murderer, Harry."

"Not if they were mad," said Harry. "Not if they were under the Imperius Curse. And I think Draco was dreadfully close to that when I found him." He paused and then leaned forwards. He should have been the more impressive figure anyway, since he was standing up and Shacklebolt was sitting down, but Draco thought he grew in stature as he stood there, drawing strength and passion into him with one furious breath. "Can you think, sir, how much strength it would take to survive something like what Draco survived? Being transported from place to place on a whim, always believing that beasts were chasing you and would kill you if they caught you? Knowing any reprieve was temporary? Not being able to realize what was going on? I might have helped Draco get out of his predicament, but he was the one who had to survive until I got there. He's the strongest one in this room."

Shacklebolt paused before he answered, as if he were overwhelmed by Harry's putting it that way. Draco knew how he felt. He was as staggered as though someone had punched him in the gut.

At last Shacklebolt said, "You cannot be certain that he can control his talent yet."

"No," Harry agreed. "That's why he'll stay with me until you can work out whether he'll need a trial." From the tone of his voice, Draco knew that Harry didn't feel that way. "I can't ask anyone else to take the risk."

"And you don't know how large an area he can control?"

"Were there any reports of strange activity in Wiltshire while we were in Malfoy Manor, sir?" Harry cocked his head politely to the side, as if he were actually interested in Shacklebolt's answer.

"No," Shacklebolt said slowly. He seemed to be feeling out the question for traps.

"Well, then." Harry clapped his hands together, smiling. "I think it's fair to say that any area Draco creates is extremely limited in scope. There are people living not too far from Malfoy Manor—wizards who would have been able to feel the operation of wild magic. The area he creates is about the size of a house, then. And you know I live fairly far from my neighbors. If Draco stays in my house, then it's unlikely he'll harm anyone else."

Draco blinked and swallowed. Shacklebolt was less dignified and let his mouth fall open. The next moment, he closed it and shook his head. "I can't ask you to take that risk, Harry."

Harry looked at him mildly, raising his eyebrows slowly enough that Draco could tell the gesture conveyed extreme contempt. "You don't have to ask me, sir. I'm volunteering for it."

Shacklebolt shook his head again, eyes fastened to Harry's face. They were intense, as though he were trying to convey some message Draco couldn't understand. "It's still not something that I should allow you to do," he said.

Harry must have caught the message, because he smiled more broadly. "But you're going to allow me to do it anyway, aren't you, sir?"

"I must be mad." Shacklebolt looked at the report that Harry had spent most of last night writing, before Draco enticed him into bed and gave his hand better things to hold than a quill. "But yes, if you think you can live with him, keep him safe, and keep his magic from slaughtering anyone else, all right."

Draco flinched at the word "slaughtering," but noticed that Harry had turned and looked at him just as Shacklebolt said it. The expression on his face was strong, and calm, and soothed Draco's feelings enough that he could sit upright a moment later and look evenly back. Harry gave him a small smile that curved the left side of his lips, and which Draco had already come to realize was just for him, then turned back to Shacklebolt. "All right," he repeated. "I think we'll both agree to that."

This time, Draco saw no need to look away when Shacklebolt cast a doubtful glance at him. He was the strongest person in the room. Harry had said so, and he ought to act like it.

_Besides, it's not everyone who has Harry Potter on their side. _

*

"I don't remember this."

Harry turned to smile at Draco as he unlocked the front door of his house. "I moved a year or so after you went over to France," he said, touching his wand to the plate by the door to activate the modified Muggle lighting. "There were a few too many threats from insane Dark wizards intent on taking over the world."

Draco stood in the middle of the drawing room and looked around as though he didn't know whether to find fault with Harry's taste or not. Harry leaned against the wall and tried to conceal his amusement. Everything was the way _he _liked it to be: plain white walls, brilliant wizarding landscapes that shimmered and moved with what looked like sunlight, large lamps everywhere and a chandelier overhead. It wasn't the height of fashion, and Draco would probably scold him for having only four chairs in the entire enormous room, but Harry didn't entertain huge gatherings of people. He'd never seen the need for more of it.

"You could make this so much better," Draco said at last.

"Actually, it improves a lot just with you standing in the middle of it," Harry said, as blandly as possible.

Draco turned and faced him. His eyelashes were fluttering a little and his breath was coming so fast that one would have thought they hadn't fucked in an entire day. Harry went to him and kissed him gently on the side of the mouth, stepping away when Draco tried to snog him.

"We should contact Hermione soon," he said, walking into the kitchen. "She'll know more than I do about legal precedents for wizards with wild talents."

"You aren't worried, are you?"

Harry paused and turned to face Draco. There was a faintly accusatory sound in his voice, and he had his arms folded as if he was cold. But Harry knew perfectly well that Warming Charms had sprung to life as soon as they entered the house and would keep them comfortable until they departed. It was an expensive modification that an enormous blizzard during the last winter had persuaded him to get.

"About acquitting you?" Harry shook his head, eyes fastened on Draco's face. "Not a bit."

"But why?" Draco turned away from him and stared into the drawing room as if he were contemplating rearranging the furniture. "I have one mark against me in my reputation already. Most people will want to see me charged with murder when they figure out what I did. I'll probably be tried by the Wizengamot, and you don't have as much influence with them as you do with Shacklebolt."

"All that's true," Harry said calmly. "But you've forgotten one thing."

"What's that?" Draco sounded sulky.

Harry slid his arms around his waist. Draco started; he obviously hadn't heard Harry walking towards him. "I'm here for you," Harry whispered. "I love you. I won't _let _them condemn you because of your name or your reputation alone. We'll find out all the pertinent facts we need to, and we'll _use _them. We'll stand up to this and fight this, Draco, and I don't care what they do to me. If you could be strong enough to survive what you did with your sanity intact, I can be strong enough to survive this fight and not back down."

And he kissed Draco before he could object.

*

Draco wanted to say that sometimes being strong wasn't enough. He wanted to pull back and complain that even Harry's name had to reach a limit to its power some time. He wanted to whinge about the Wizengamot being such a hard opponent to defeat, and how his parents would want him to hide, and how Harry's friends would react when they discovered that he was _dating _Draco and not just friends with him, and—

But the kiss made it awfully hard to say any of that. Or believe it, for that matter.

And after what felt like years and had been months of running through forests, through deserts, and over mountains away from beasts, Draco thought he could relax and depend on someone else's assurance for once.

_Especially the one person who sees as I see. _

_Especially when I'll join my strength to his._

So Draco closed his eyes and leaned forwards, hands braced on Harry's chest as he returned the kiss, giving as good as he got.

**End.**


End file.
